pyscreenshot 0.3.3

python screenshot

The pyscreenshot module can be used to copy the contents of the screen to a PIL or Pillow image memory. Replacement for the ImageGrab Module, which works on Windows only. For handling image memory (e.g. saving to file, converting,..) please read PIL or Pillow documentation.

Links:

• home: https://github.com/ponty/pyscreenshot

• documentation: http://ponty.github.com/pyscreenshot

Goal:

Pyscreenshot tries to allow to take screenshots without installing 3rd party libraries. It is cross-platform but useful for Linux based distributions. It is only a pure Python wrapper, a thin layer over existing back-ends. Its strategy should work on most Linux distributions: a lot of back-ends are wrapped, if at least one exists then it works, if not then one back-end should be installed. Performance and interactivity are not important for this library.

Features:

• Cross-platform wrapper

• Capturing the whole desktop

• Capturing an area

• saving to PIL or Pillow image memory

• some back-ends are based on this discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/69645/take-a-screenshot-via-a-python-script-linux

• pure Python library

• supported python versions: 2.6, 2.7

• Plugin based, it has wrappers for various back-ends:

  • scrot

  • ImageMagick

  • PyGTK

  • PIL or Pillow (only on windows)

  • PyQt4

  • wxPython

Known problems:

• different back-ends generate slightly different images from the same desktop, this should be investigated

• ImageMagick creates blackbox on some systems

• PyGTK back-end does not check $DISPLAY -> not working with Xvfb

• slow: 0.2s - 0.7s

Similar projects:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtkshots/

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopy

Usage

Example:

import pyscreenshot as ImageGrab

# fullscreen
im=ImageGrab.grab()
im.show()

# part of the screen
im=ImageGrab.grab(bbox=(10,10,510,510)) # X1,Y1,X2,Y2
im.show()

Installation

General

• install pip

• install PIL or Pillow

• install at least one back-end

• install the program:

  # as root
  pip install pyscreenshot

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install pyscreenshot
sudo apt-get install python-imaging
# optional back-ends
sudo apt-get install scrot
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install python-gtk2
sudo apt-get install python-qt4
# optional for examples
sudo pip install entrypoint2

Uninstall

# as root
pip uninstall pyscreenshot