[support] I get "all backends failed" after a while - any tips?

[lowfuel]

Should start by saying I only really know enough to be dangerous re: python and linux.

I've written a script that uses pyscreenshot to take a full screen screenshot every second or so, do some processing, then repeat.
This works great for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, but after that I start I get "all backends failed" on each attempt, and it never recovers.

I'm sure this is just something wonky with my OS and/or Window Manager (CachyOS based on Arch, and Wayland).

What I'm wonder is if there's some way to sort of reboot pyscreenshot from within my script? Right now I have to control-C it and start it fresh.

Thanks for any tips!

My code isn't complicated, here's the relevant bits:
import pyscreenshot as ImageGrab

img = ImageGrab.grab()
np_img = cv2.cvtColor(np.array(img), cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

[lowfuel]

If anyone else comes across this, I think I've solved it by installing the "xdg-desktop-portal" backend, and adding this to my ImageGrab.grab():

backend="freedesktop_dbus", childprocess=False)

[Weirwindle]

If anyone else comes across this, I think I've solved it by installing the "xdg-desktop-portal" backend, and adding this to my ImageGrab.grab():

backend="freedesktop_dbus", childprocess=False)

Thank you, this fixed pyscreenshot for me

[lowfuel]

If anyone else comes across this, I think I've solved it by installing the "xdg-desktop-portal" backend, and adding this to my ImageGrab.grab():
backend="freedesktop_dbus", childprocess=False)

Thank you, this fixed pyscreenshot for me

Glad it helped! I just wish this backend was faster. :( Taking over 1.3 seconds for a single screenshot is painful.

[Weirwindle]

If anyone else comes across this, I think I've solved it by installing the "xdg-desktop-portal" backend, and adding this to my ImageGrab.grab():
backend="freedesktop_dbus", childprocess=False)

Thank you, this fixed pyscreenshot for me

Glad it helped! I just wish this backend was faster. :( Taking over 1.3 seconds for a single screenshot is painful.

Same! It takes 600ms per screenshot on kubuntu 26.04.
Pyautogui on windows used to take only about 20-40ms.
To many layers to get what is needed on wayland.
I have been trying to reimplement a lot of what pyautogui did, such as mouse control, keyboard control, screen grabs, pixel searching, hotkey monitoring...

[lowfuel]

One thing I noticed was that if I take a screenshot via bash using the same backend method, it saves the screenshot automatically in the Pictures folder under my user directory. The filename has a date/time stamp which ends in seconds. So if you try to take another screenshot right away, nothing happens because that filename is already taken.

I wrote a test script that uses this commandline method and instantly moves this file out of the way, looping, and I can get screenshots every 100ms or so. Problem is it's quite flaky and unreliable.

(to be clear this isn't a pyscreenshot issue I'm talking about, just an observation about the behavior of this backend -- I wonder if pyscreenshot's underlying method has to wait a second just because of this built in limitation to gdbus)

If you want to experiment, the command line (at least for me) is:

gdbus call --session --dest org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop --object-path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop --method org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot.Screenshot "" {}