Taking screenshots on the Raspberry PI

Want to share something you created on your PI and could figure out the best way to create a screenshot? This small blog post will show you an easy way to create snapshots. Screenshots work both in X and in the linux console since the tool directly captures the screen using the lowlevel Dispmanx API.

Installing the tool

The screenshot tool is part of a small collection of tools written for info-beamer pi but they are perfectly usable without using info-beamer itself. Source code is available on github.

Installing should be easy. First fetch the source code using git:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ git clone https://github.com/info-beamer/tools.git
Cloning into 'tools'...
remote: Counting objects: 36, done.
remote: Total 36 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (36/36), done.
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ 

Now you have the code available in the directory tools. Enter the directory tools/screenshot and run make.

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cd tools/screenshot/
pi@raspberrypi ~/tools/screenshot $ make
cc -DHAVE_LIBBCM_HOST -DUSE_EXTERNAL_LIBBCM_HOST [...] screenshot.c -o screenshot
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ 

You can now use the program screenshot. For easier use you can also install it in /usr/local/bin so you can run it from anywhere:

pi@raspberrypi ~/tools/screenshot $ sudo make install
install -D -o root -g root -m 755 screenshot /usr/local/bin/screenshot
pi@raspberrypi ~/tools/screenshot $ 

Taking screenshots

Taking screenshots is easy. Just call the screenshot program and send its output to a file:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ screenshot > /tmp/my-first-screenshot.jpg
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ 

Now you have the current content of the screen captured in /tmp/my-first-screenshot.jpg.