How to Take a Screenshot on the Raspberry Pi

Open your favorite command line program and log into your Raspberry Pi via SSH.

We're going to use the raspi2png library to take screenshots. I tested out several screen capture applications for the Raspberry Pi and this one consistently performed the best.

After logging into your Pi, download the project from the raspi2png Github repository:

git clone https://github.com/AndrewFromMelbourne/raspi2png

Then, copy it to the usr/local/bin directory (or create an alias):

sudo cp -a raspi2png/raspi2png /usr/local/bin

To take a Raspberry Pi screenshot, run the following command:

raspi2png -p screenshot-name.png

I recommend creating a screenshots directory. I created one in ~/screenshots:

sudo mkdir ~/screenshots

Then, when you take a screenshot, you can either cd to that directory and run the screenshot command:

cd ~/screenshots
raspi2png -p screenshot-name.png

.. or, you can specify that directory when you run the command from anywhere:

raspi2png -p ~/screenshots/screenshot-name.png

As the name suggests, raspi2png outputs PNGS, which is generally the format you want for taking photos of text, menu systems, and retro games. PNG is a lossless format, so it's ideal for cases like this that have fewer colors, and won't result in any compression artifacts.

You can optionally specify width/height, compression level, which Raspberry Pi display to screenshot (in case you have a multi-monitor setup on your Pi.. for some reason), etc.

For example, if I wanted a smaller PNG (though lower quality), I could specify a higher compression level:

raspi2png -p screenshot-name.png -c 5

Options and their usage are documented in the raspi2png readme file.