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Taking Screenshots with adb

It is possible to take a screenshot of your Android application with Android Debug Bridge (adb) using these methods:

  1. screencap command
  2. KEYCODE_SYSRQ KeyEvent

1. screencap command​

Basic Usage​

  1. Connect your computer with an Android device via USB debugging or wireless debugging.
  2. Open a terminal in your computer and run this command. 
    adb shell screencap sdcard/my-screenshot.png
  3. This command will take a screenshot of your connected Android device and save it as a PNG file named my-screenshot.png in your Internal Storage. If there is already a file with that name, the file will be overwritten.

screencap only supports 1 image file type: PNG, so you should append .png to your saved file name.

View screencap Documentation​

To learn what you can do with screencap, run this command:

adb shell screencap --help 
# OR
adb shell screencap -h

You will get result similar to this:

$ adb shell screencap -h              
usage: screencap [-hp] [-d display-id] [FILENAME]
   -h: this message
   -p: save the file as a png.
   -d: specify the physical display ID to capture (default: 0)
       see "dumpsys SurfaceFlinger --display-id" for valid display IDs.
If FILENAME ends with .png it will be saved as a png.
If FILENAME is not given, the results will be printed to stdout.

Multiple Connected Devices​

If your computer is connected to multiple devices, you will encounter a problem when running the above command:

$ adb shell screencap sdcard/my-screenshot.png
adb: more than one device/emulator

You need to specify which device you want to take a screenshot of. First find out the serial number of the device by running adb devices:

$ adb devices
List of devices attached
emulator-5556 device product:sdk_google_phone_x86_64 model:Android_SDK_built_for_x86_64 device:generic_x86_64
emulator-5554 device product:sdk_google_phone_x86 model:Android_SDK_built_for_x86 device:generic_x86
0a388e93      device usb:1-1 product:razor model:Nexus_7 device:flo

Then you need to copy the serial number of the device (for example emulator-5556) and use it as a parameter:

adb -s emulator-5556 shell screencap sdcard/my-multiple-devices-screenshot.png

Download Screenshot to Computer​

When you have taken the screenshot, you might want to download it to your computer. Simply run these commands:

$ adb shell screencap sdcard/my-screenshot.png 

$ adb pull sdcard/my-screenshot.png
/sdcard/my-screenshot.png: 1 file pulled, 0 skipped. 3.2 MB/s (169632 bytes in 0.051s)

The screenshot will be downloaded to the folder that your terminal is currently running.

2. KEYCODE_SYSRQ KeyEvent​

It is also possible to take a screenshot by inputting a KeyEvent with adb. The KeyEvent we need to do this is KEYCODE_SYSRQ (a constant value of 120).

  1. Connect your computer with an Android device via USB debugging or wireless debugging.
  2. Open a terminal in your computer and run this command. 
    adb shell input keyevent 120
  3. This command will take a screenshot of your connected Android device as if you are taking it directly from your device.

References​

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