'Fastest way to take a screenshot with python on windows

What's the fastest way to take a screenshot on windows? PIL.ImageGrab is rather slow.. it takes between 4-5 seconds to take 30 screenshots of the same small window. Taking screenshots of the whole desktop is even slower.

Solution 1:^[1]

Just found out how to do it with gtk. Seems fastest by far:

def image_grab_gtk(window):
    left, top, right, bot = get_rect(window)
    w = right - left
    h = bot - top

    s = gtk.gdk.Pixbuf(
        gtk.gdk.COLORSPACE_RGB, False, 8, w, h)

    s.get_from_drawable(
        gtk.gdk.get_default_root_window(),
        gtk.gdk.colormap_get_system(),
        left, top, 0, 0, w, h )

    final = Image.frombuffer(
        "RGB",
        (w, h),
        s.get_pixels(),
        "raw",
        "RGB",
        s.get_rowstride(), 1)
    return final

Without converting to a PIL Image, it's 8x faster than PIL on my test case. With converting, it's still ~2.7x faster.

Solution 2:^[2]

You can use package mss:

Save screenshot to image file

import mss

with mss.mss() as sct:
    filename = sct.shot(output="output.png")

Get the numpy representation of screenshot

import mss
import numpy as np

with mss.mss() as sct:
    monitor = {"top": 160, "left": 160, "width": 160, "height": 135}
    img_array = np.array(sct.grab(monitor))
    # Do whatever you want...

Solution 3:^[3]

You can try my newly created project DXcam: I think for raw speed it's the fastest out there (in python, and without going too deep into the rabbit hole). It's originally created for a deep learning pipeline for FPS games where the higher FPS you get the better. Plus I (am trying to) design it to be user-friendly: For a screenshot just do

import dxcam
camera = dxcam.create()
frame = camera.grab()  # full screen
frame = camera.grab(region=(left, top, right, bottom))  # region

For screen capturing:

camera.start(target_fps=60)  # threaded
for i in range(1000):
    image = camera.get_latest_frame()  # Will block until new frame available
camera.stop()

I copied the part of the benchmarks section from the readme:

	DXcam	python-mss	D3DShot
Average FPS	238.79	75.87	118.36
Std Dev	1.25	0.5447	0.3224

The benchmarks is conducted through 5 trials on my 240hz monitor with a constant 240hz rendering rate synced w/the monitor (using blurbuster ufo test).

You can read more about the details here: https://github.com/ra1nty/DXcam

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1	Claudiu
Solution 2	SeanCheey
Solution 3	ra1n

'Fastest way to take a screenshot with python on windows

Solution 1:[1]

Solution 2:[2]