Python Imaging Library fails to grab whole screen

Question

I am using PIL to grab a screen shot, but it is only capturing a part of the screen.

Here is a screen shot of my desktop

And this is what the program captur

Answer 1

I was having this problem too earlier today. The script would only capture pixels 0,0 - 1536,864. I recently switched to windows 8 and noticed that some programs seemed to be displayed at the incorrect resolution. After some searching I found a fix.

• Go to your python directory (c:/python27/ for me)
• Right click python.exe and select properties
• Select the compatibility tab
• Press the "Change settings for all users" button
• Check the "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" box
• ImageGrab will now capture the entire resolution

I'll update if I find a universal fix, but I thought I'd post here since I searched for an hour or so and couldn't find a solution.

EDIT:

Universal fix

• right click desktop
• select "screen resolution"
• click on "make text and other items larger or smaller"
• check "let me choose one scaling level for all my displays"
• select "smaller - 100%"

This will result is a smaller but sharper text and icons.

Answer 2

There is a working workaround for this without fiddling with the OS settings. The solution is to use the following to make your program DPI aware on Windows :

from ctypes import windll
user32 = windll.user32
user32.SetProcessDPIAware()

Hope that helps