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.
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.
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
When initialising an instance of MSS, you can enable debug output:
mss = mss_class(debug=True)
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.
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)