Cannot from PIL import ImageGrab

[travellers]

Does Pillow2.5.3 ImageGrab still not support other OS except windows?
If not, why we cannot do that?

---

/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Pillow-2.5.3-py2.7-macosx-10.9-intel.egg/PIL/init.py

Python 2.7.5 (default, Mar 9 2014, 22:15:05)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

from PIL import ImageGrab
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/PIL/ImageGrab.py", line 26, in
ImportError: No module named _grabscreen

[hugovk]

Pillow supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD but ImageGrab is Windows-only.

Note: The current version works on Windows only.

http://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/ImageGrab.html

But we can definitely improve the error message on non-Windows.

[travellers]

Sorry, why Pillow cannot support ImageGrab on other OS except windows?

[wiredfool]

Because it's implemented using the windows api.

[hugovk]

Error message improved in PR #906.

[ronjouch]

Sorry, why Pillow cannot support ImageGrab on other OS except windows?

...

Because it's implemented using the windows api.

I'm also searching for ways to do screenshots with Python under Linux, and stumbled upon pyscreenshot, which precisely compensates for Pil(low) supporting ImageGrab only under Windows. It does so by wrapping existing backends such as scrot, imagemagick, and a few others.

That may be a solution for me, but with your knowledge of Pillow and Linux APIs, do you see another alternative to implement this feature in a more "native" way in core Pillow? Put differently, would it be feasible/desirable to implement a PyImaging_GrabScreenLinux function in Pillow's display.c without resorting to using external backends, or should I forget about it?

#Because it's implemented using the windows api.

In other words an implementation using Quartz is beyond the scope of this project?

[radarhere]

I think others were simply commenting on the block of code that is known as ImageGrab, rather than the functionality of it. I've created a PR to add the grab method of ImageGrab to OS X, which I'm guessing is what you're after. I didn't need to invoke Quartz - there's a command line utility called screencapture.

right, imagegrab kills python scripts on non-windows machines because its win32api or com, i forget which. you're right a simple implementation based on screencapture will work, but to me the use of image grab has always seemed suboptimal for this reason (in other words other scripts using image grab make a suboptimal choice). quartz seems to me to be a happy medium that enables cross platform functionality without coding solutions for both OS, unless I am missing something.

thank you very much for the response and dialogue.

[radarhere]

No problem. The PR has been merged now, so if you download the master branch, it will be there, or you can wait for the release of Pillow 3.0 on October 1.

Perhaps I'm the one missing something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer) is OS X only. What cross platform functionality are you discussing?