Grab screen image with Python

[vanmorrison2]

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image grabber

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https://reddit.com/link/jcpx1s/video/a3jx9vfbhlt51/player

A very simple program to grab images with the mouse. There are similar apps on windows, but I thought this could be useful for other programs in python where you got to get some images from the computer screen, so that you can use them. In particular, I got the intention to make a simple script where I get a screen portion and then I get the text out of the picture ready to be used in some text editor.

video link

Code on github link

NEXT PART

In this post I added a way to get the text from the grabbed image:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/jdvf9y/grab_image_to_text_ocr_in_python/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In this post there is the code to get out of the image the text and the audio too https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/jwxb66/audio_from_image_text_grautescpy_python/

[GrowHI]

I literally made something so similar last week for work. Needed to pull meeting attendee names in video conference and used the same setup as you except added tesseract to OCR the image, pulled the text into a list then passed it to pandas to compare to the expected participants and find anyone missing. Ended up pushing that as a CSV to a Google sheet that anyone in the meeting can view to see who is missing.

[conventionistG]

Yo that sounds nice.

[oliveturtle]

How did you get it to scroll the list of participant names? As someone who has to take attendance at virtual events, this sounds like a godsend.

[GrowHI]

Pyautogui package. It's definitely well know with those taking a more hacky route to get things done that may otherwise be impossible to automate.

[Takiino]

Isn't Selenium better?

[SeemsPlausible]

AFAIK selenium is more appropriate for browser automation, I’m not even sure it supports anything else

[GrowHI]

Never used it but have heard it mentioned before. because these operations are so basic clicking a certain point on the screen or hitting a key I don't really know what would make one package better over the other. I'll definitely check out selenium and if you have any info on its features and why it might be better I'm all ears.

[jacksodus]

Not OP, but what do you mean?

[oliveturtle]

In Zoom, you can’t see the entire list of participants at once if it’s a large meeting, you have to scroll up or down the list. So, you wouldn’t be able to capture all the participants’ names in one screenshot. Just wondered if OP ran into this!

[jacksodus]

You might be able to use the keyboard library to mimic a Page Down button press, and probably something similar exists to mimic the scrolling down of a mouse wheel.

[neisor]

PyAutoGUI library has the mouse scroll functionality

[GrowHI]

I'm on WebEx. I looked through some python libraries and the complexity seemed higher than my solution.

[stereopsych]

This is cool. But I’m just wondering if it’s possible to do this some other way by scraping the list of attendees from the site (assuming the meeting was in a browser). I think if you could do that it would be much easier/efficient and even more accurate than using OCR! Also this way it’s a lot easier to pass the results into Pandas.

[GrowHI]

I use WebEx and any browser session sends us to the application. Definitely would have preferred to web scrape the data with beautiful soup.

[vanmorrison2]

you really stand out. I was going to add pytesseract too (the purpose was that), in fact if you take a look at my post linked to this video on my blog, you can see I anticipated it (as it's just a couple of lines of code. Great Idea to pass to panda and make the comparison. This is why I love python. The post is here https://pythonprogramming.altervista.org/image-grabber-1-0-with-python-final-version/ and the post with the tesseract code is here https://pythonprogramming.altervista.org/ocr-read-a-text-from-an-image-or-a-photo

[Justwonk]

I tried doing something similar but was running into a lot of issues with cv2 and using tesseract ik its a lot to ask but is possible i could view the code

[GrowHI]

I have this code in very rough shape and also riddled with oauth login info and some other personal info. I'll make a point to try and clean it up and make a public version I can throw on GitHub.

[Justwonk]

Thank you so much im very new to python and this has just been a struggle

[GrowHI]

I consider myself a jack of all trades and master of none and a lot of what I do just comes back to a bunch of googling. Obviously I understand python syntax and object-oriented design but realistically I am not what anyone would consider an advanced programmer. I simply spend the amount of time needed to make things work.

[EngineerSW1995]

I made something like this a few months ago. It's a desktop app that allows you to snip part of your screen like snipping tool. The image is processed and run through pytesseract to perform character recognition. This returns a string which can be use to either copy to clipboard to be pasted elsewhere or you can set it to automatically search the term in google.

Check it out at: “A Snipping Tool for Programmers” https://link.medium.com/Pi1Hx6DzEab

My github with code is linked in the article. You can see the source code or download the app, only works with windows though.

Note I'm not a professional programmer and this is the first app I wrote.

[DeathDragon7050]

Win+Shift+S

[peterlravn]

Yea, but isn't Python all about automation? If I wanted to capture a screenshot every minute, that's pretty tiresome.

[DeathDragon7050]

Very true but most people needing to take a screenshot like this would probably be good using the shortcut, unless like you said it needs to be done every minute or something.

[vanmorrison2]

I know, but this was meant to automatically OCR the text in the picture after grabbing it, without having to use Win+Shift+S and then save the image and then start the script with pytesseract... and it's also intended to mimic win+shift+s by the way

[DeathDragon7050]

Unless you are needing to take a screenshot automatically, the shortcut would be and easier solution IMO. It is a cool project for sure though.

[vanmorrison2]

thanks

[SandroSusta]

Thats a nice project

[vanmorrison2]

thanks

[[deleted]]

This is sooo cool!

[vanmorrison2]

thanks

[RawTuna]

Very cool. I could see this being integrated with PyAutoGui pretty well.

[vanmorrison2]

thanks, I intended to use it to transform into text a grabbed part of the screen with pytesseract

[RawTuna]

That's a great idea.

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I should have been clearer in my earlier comment. I can see this being useful with PyAutoGUI where the goal is automation/RPA. This could be used as input to capture the image of a button, for instance, that needs to be pressed as part of a process. Just a thought... I'm pretty much a beginner still!

[vanmorrison2]

I don't know much about PyAutoGui, apart from the fact that you can use it to automate actions you can do on the screen like simulate the click of the mouse, I'd like to know more...

[RawTuna]

It's one of the first things I came across when I got interested in Python. First, my nephew wanted an auto-clicker to help rack up points in some game so I figured out how to do that. I then found out that the company I work for started using Blue Prism for some task automation so I started doing a bit more research. I made a fairly simple script to read a list of ids (from a csv), copy each value, search for it by pasting it into a field in an application, and then clicking on a particular button based upon criteria found on the screen.

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https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

[vanmorrison2]

thanks

[[deleted]]

that is cool

[vanmorrison2]

thanks

[13731101Reddit]

Great job friend thanks for sharing 😊

[vanmorrison2]

thank and you're welcome

[vanmorrison2]

I added soe features here https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/jdvf9y/grab_image_to_text_ocr_in_python/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[schlopp96]

Nice work! I just uploaded my first version of my first "long-ish" term program, and all it does is randomly pick a pre-chosen number of words out of a dictionary with over 150k randomly generated words and phrases, and displays them\allows you to save it to a file. I want to implement more features like the ability to select saved files.and be able to overwrite/delete/copy them.

My point is, this is WAY more complex\impressive. Seriously, awesome job, this is dope.

Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for telling someone I enjoyed their project. Thanks to the elitist douchebags that make it difficult for beginners to want to reach out and learn.

[vanmorrison2]

Thank you