How to take screen shots in Java

• Tweet

• Tweet

While surfing through internet, I came to this amazing piece of code in Java that takes the screen shot of your desktop and save it in a PNG file.

This example uses java.awt.Robot class to capture the screen pixels and returns a BufferedImage. Java.awt.Robot class is used to take the control of mouse and keyboard. Once you get the control, you can do any type of operation related to mouse and keyboard through your java code. This class is used generally for test automation.

Copy and paste following code in your Java class and invoke the method captureScreen() with file name as argument. The screen shot will be stored in the file that you specified in argument.

import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Rectangle;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import java.io.File;

...

public void captureScreen(String fileName) throws Exception {

   Dimension screenSize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
   Rectangle screenRectangle = new Rectangle(screenSize);
   Robot robot = new Robot();
   BufferedImage image = robot.createScreenCapture(screenRectangle);
   ImageIO.write(image, "png", new File(fileName));

}
...