I found this feature while looking inside Graphics class and since it was so simple to use, I decided to post it here. It basically allows you to take print screens programmatically and save them as local images or forward them through the network, etc.

As I said, it doesn’t require more than 15 lines of code - this function: Graphics.CopyFromScreen does all the ‘hard work’ so we only need to put this into a Bitmap and save/display it.

To the code!

There are 3 steps that you need to follow:

  • create a Bitmap that’s exactly the screen’s size
  • using that Bitmap, create a Graphics object (Graphics.FromImage)
  • use CopyFromScreen() and save the Bitmap

The code looks like this:

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private void takeScreenShot()
{
    Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Width, Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Height);
    using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bmp))
    {
        g.CopyFromScreen(0, 0, 0, 0, Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Size);
        bmp.Save("screenshot.png");  // saves the image
    }                 
}