Screenshot Your Flutter Widgets: A Practical Guide with the Screenshot Package

Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik

Ever wanted to capture a specific portion of your Flutter app's UI as an image? Whether it's for sharing a design mockup, exporting UI elements for documentation, or enabling your users share an experience from your app eg. the spotify's sharing of lyrics, the screenshot package provides a powerful and convenient solution.

This article will guide you through utilizing the screenshot package to effortlessly capture your Flutter widgets as images. We'll explore the package functionalities, implementation steps, and practical use cases.

They are other approaches you can take like using the RenderObject toImage(), and packages like widget_to_image, etc.

Getting Started

The first step is to add the screenshot package to your Flutter project. Open your pubspec.yaml file and add the following line under the dependencies section:

dependencies:
  screenshot: ^3.0.0

or use the command

flutter pub add screenshot

Once you've added the package, you can import it into your Dart code:

import 'package:screenshot/screenshot.dart';

Capturing Widgets with ScreenshotController

The core component of the screenshot package is the ScreenshotController. This controller provides methods to capture a screenshot of the widget it's associated with. Here's how to use it:

1. Create a ScreenshotController Instance:

ScreenshotController screenshotController = ScreenshotController();

2. Wrap Your Widget:

Wrap the widget you want to capture with the Screenshot widget. This widget takes the controller property as an argument:

Screenshot(
  controller: screenshotController,
  child: YourWidgetHere(),
)

3. Capture the Screenshot:

Use the capture method of the screenshotController to take a screenshot. This method returns a Uint8List containing the image data:

Future<Uint8List> capturedImage = await screenshotController.capture();

If you are trying to use it from a non-async function, you can just call screenshotController.capture().then(...

Saving the Captured Image

Once you have the Uint8List containing the image data, you can save it to a file using the path_provider library:

final directory = await getTemporaryDirectory();
final imageFile = await File('${directory.path}/image.png').create();
await imageFile.writeAsBytes(capturedImage);

At this point, You can use the imageFile variable above to do various things like: show the image to the user using Image.File(... or allow the user to share the image to other apps using the share_plus package.

await Share.shareXFiles([XFile(imageFile.path)]);

Additional Features

The screenshot package also offers some additional features:

• Capturing a specific area: You can specify a rectangular area within the wrapped widget to capture instead of the entire widget.

• Capturing with delays: Utilize the captureFromWidget method to capture the screenshot after a specified delay, allowing for dynamic UI updates before capturing.

  %[pub.dev/packages/screenshot/]

  The screenshot package provides a straightforward and effective way to capture Flutter widgets as images. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can easily integrate this functionality into your projects and unlock its valuable capabilities for various use cases. Remember to explore the package's additional features to tailor the capturing process according to your specific needs.