How to take screenshot of entire display pygame

Question

I am creating a painter software and want the user to be able to save their image after they have finished creating it, so I tried pygame.image.save(pygame.display.get_surface(), "/home/user/screenshot.png"). I made a quick drawing and pressed the key I set which would save the image. I look at the image, and it's only saved the blank display surface, not the pygame.draw.rect()s of the actual drawing. I looked at the following links: How to capture pygame screen? https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/118372/how-can-i-take-a-screenshot-of-a-certain-part-of-the-screen-in-pygame Can python get the screen shot of a specific window? and much more. How would I take a screenshot of the entire display screen along with the drawing? This is my mainloop:

running = True
while running:
    updateWindow() # Updates window
    clearWindow() # Clears window
    checkEvents() # Checks events
    redrawItems() # Redraws your drawing
    pygame.event.pump()
pygame.display.quit()
pygame.quit()

duplicate question: [how to take screenshot of entire display pygame](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63342477/how-to-take-screenshot-of-entire-display-pygame?r=SearchResults&s=12%7C0.0000) — Yax P., Aug 10 '20 at 23:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 10 '20 at 19:16

Try pygame.Surface.copy on the display surface. See docs here.

So if display is your screen, then:

screencopy = display.copy()

should get you a copy of the display image in screencopy. Remember because of double buffering it will give you a copy of what you would see on the screen if you did an display.update() right then, which might be different that what is showing on the screen if you have done things that have not yet been pushed to the screen yet by an update().

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 10 '20 at 21:17

You can do this using pygame.image.save(Surface, filename), which you can read more about here

Below is a simple function that will save a portion of the display as an image.

def Capture(display,name,pos,size): # (pygame Surface, String, tuple, tuple)
    image = pygame.Surface(size)  # Create image surface
    image.blit(display,(0,0),(pos,size))  # Blit portion of the display to the image
    pygame.image.save(image,name)  # Save the image to the disk**

What this function does is created a pygame surface named image. Then the area (pos,size) is blitted to image at its origin. Finally, pygame.image.save(Surface, filename) will be called and save image to the disk.

For example, if we want to save a 100x100 image named "Capture.png" at the pos 50x50 on the display, name would equal "Capture.png", pos would equal (50,50), and size would equal (100,100), and the function call would look as such:

Capture(display,"Capture.png",(50,50),(100,100))

How to take screenshot of entire display pygame

2 Answers2