At some point or another, you may come across a time when you need to capture the user’s screen and save it as an image. Maybe you’re making your own “print screen” program, or doing some other image analysis. Regardless, there is a really simple way to capture the user’s screen, and here it is.

import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.Rectangle;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;

import javax.swing.ImageIcon;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;

public class ScreenCapture {

	public static void main( String[] args ) {

		/**
		 * Ideally, this should be set to the dimensions of
		 * the user's screen
		 */

		Rectangle rect = new Rectangle();
		rect.width = 1680;
		rect.height = 1050;
		BufferedImage bi;

		/**
		 * Grab the screen and put it in a JFrame.
		 */

		try {

			JFrame frame = new JFrame();		// Frame to show the image
			Robot robot = new Robot();		// Create the robot
			bi = robot.createScreenCapture(rect);	// This is where the magic happens

			/**
			 * Here we just add the buffered image to a
			 * JLabel using ImageIcon. Then we pack the
			 * JFrame and set it to visible.
			 */

			frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
			frame.add(new JLabel(new ImageIcon(bi)));
			frame.pack();
			frame.setVisible(true);

		} catch ( AWTException e ) {

			e.printStackTrace();

		} // end try block

	} // end main method

} // end class ScreenCapture

If you don’t want to capture the screen immediately, you can set the robot on a delay right before you call the createScreenCapture method, such as:

Robot robot = new Robot();		// Create the robot
robot.delay(5000);			// Delay in Milliseconds
bi = robot.createScreenCapture(rect);	// This is where the magic happens

You can (and probably should) change the dimensions of where the screenshot takes place by changing lines 20 and 21:

rect.width = 800;	// Change to your preferred width
rect.height = 600;	// Change to your preferred height

If you want to use the user’s screen size as the dimensions for the screenshot, change this to the following:

Dimension dim = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
Rectangle rect = new Rectangle();
rect.width = dim.width;
rect.height = dim.height;

Enjoy!

Tags: print screen, robot, screen capture, screenshot

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Java, Programming, Snippets, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.