Skip to main content

A cross-platform multi-screen shot module in pure python using ctypes

Project description

Very basic, it will grab one screen shot by monitor or a screen shot of all monitors and save it to an optimised PNG file, Python 2.7/3.4 compatible & PEP8 compliant.

So, while you can pip install –upgrade mss, you may just drop it in your project and forget about it.

MSS stands for Multi-Screen Shot.

It’s under zlib licence.

Testing

You can try the MSS module directly from the console:

python2 mss.py [--debug]
python3 -X faulthandler mss.py

Passing the –debug argument will make it more verbose.

Instance the good class

You can determine automatically which class to use:

from platform import system
import mss

systems = {
    'Darwin': mss.MSSMac,
    'Linux': mss.MSSLinux,
    'Windows': mss.MSSWindows
    }
mss_class = systems[system()]

Or simply import the good one:

from mss import MSSLinux as mss_class

init(debug)

When initialising an instance of MSS, you can enable debug output:

mss = mss_class(debug=True)

save(output, screen, callback)

For each monitor, grab a screen shot and save it to a file.

Parameters:

output - string - the output filename. It can contain '%d' which
                  will be replaced by the monitor number.
screen - integer - grab one screen shot of all monitors (screen=-1)
                   grab one screen shot by monitor (screen=0)
                   grab the screen shot of the monitor N (screen=N)
callback - function - in case where output already exists, call
                      the defined callback function with output
                      as parameter. If it returns True, then
                      continue; else ignores the monitor and
                      switches to ne next.

This is a generator which returns created files.

Examples

Then, it is quite simple:

mss = mss_class()

try:
    # One screen shot per monitor
    for filename in mss.save():
        print('File: "{}" created.'.format(filename))

    # Screen shot of the monitor 1
    for filename in mss.save(output='monitor-%d.png', screen=1):
        print('File: "{}" created.'.format(filename))

    # A shot to grab them all :)
    for filename in mss.save(output='full-screenshot.png', screen=-1):
        print('File: "{}" created.'.format(filename))

    # Example with a callback
    def on_exists(fname):
        ''' Callback example when we try to overwrite an existing screen shot. '''

        from os import rename
        newfile = fname + '.old'
        print('Renaming "{}" to "{}"'.format(fname, newfile))
        rename(fname, newfile)
        return True

    # Screen shot of the monitor 1, with callback
    for fname in mss.save(output='mon-%d.png', screen=1, callback=on_exists):
        print('File: "{}" created.'.format(fname))
except ScreenshotError as ex:
    print(ex)

Bonus

Just for fun … Show us your screen shot with all monitors in one file, we will update the gallery.

Link to the galley: https://tiger-222.fr/tout/python-mss/galerie/

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

mss-0.0.6.tar.gz (10.3 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page