Fastest way to take a screenshot with python on windows

You could use win32 APIs directly .

1. First give the focus to the App that you want to take screenshot of.link text

2. Win32 API can help with the screenshot:

import win32guiimport win32uiimport win32conw = 1920 # set thish = 1080 # set thisbmpfilenamename = "out.bmp" #set thishwnd = win32gui.FindWindow(None, windowname)wDC = win32gui.GetWindowDC(hwnd)dcObj=win32ui.CreateDCFromHandle(wDC)cDC=dcObj.CreateCompatibleDC()dataBitMap = win32ui.CreateBitmap()dataBitMap.CreateCompatibleBitmap(dcObj, w, h)cDC.SelectObject(dataBitMap)cDC.BitBlt((0,0),(w, h) , dcObj, (0,0), win32con.SRCCOPY)dataBitMap.SaveBitmapFile(cDC, bmpfilenamename)# Free ResourcesdcObj.DeleteDC()cDC.DeleteDC()win32gui.ReleaseDC(hwnd, wDC)win32gui.DeleteObject(dataBitMap.GetHandle())

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.

You can use package mss:

Save screenshot to image file

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

Get the numpy representation of screenshot

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