The pyscreenshot module can be used to copy the contents of the screen to a PIL image memory or file. Replacement for the ImageGrab Module, which works on Windows only.

Links:

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

Features:

• Cross-platform wrapper
• Capturing the whole desktop
• Capturing an area
• saving to file or PIL 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

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

  • scrot
  • ImageMagick
  • PyGTK
  • PIL (only on windows)
  • PyQt4
  • wxPython

Known problems:

• not implemented: Capturing an active window
• 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=(10,10,500,500))
im.show()

# to file
ImageGrab.grab_to_file('im.png')

Installation

General

• install pip
• install PIL
• install at least one back-end

• install the program:

  # as root
  pip install pyscreenshot

Ubuntu

# one or more
sudo apt-get install scrot
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install python-gtk2
sudo apt-get install python-qt4
sudo apt-get install python-wxversion

# Python Imaging Library (required)
sudo apt-get install python-imaging

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install pyscreenshot

Uninstall

# as root
pip uninstall pyscreenshot