shinyscreenshot

📷 Capture screenshots of entire pages or parts of pages in Shiny apps

Demo · by Dean Attali · 10-min Tutorial

R Build Status CRAN version


{shinyscreenshot} allows you to capture screenshots of entire pages or parts of pages in Shiny apps. Can be used to capture the current state of a Shiny app, including interactive widgets (such as plotly, timevis, maps, etc). The captured image is automatically downloaded as a PNG image, or it can be saved on the server.

Need Shiny help? I’m available for consulting.
If you find {shinyscreenshot} useful, please consider supporting my work! ❤

This package is part of a larger ecosystem of packages with a shared vision: solving common Shiny issues and improving Shiny apps with minimal effort, minimal code changes, and clear documentation. Other packages for your Shiny apps:

Package Description Demo
shinyjs 💡 Easily improve the user experience of your Shiny apps in seconds 🔗
shinyalert 🗯️ Easily create pretty popup messages (modals) in Shiny 🔗
timevis 📅 Create interactive timeline visualizations in R 🔗
shinycssloaders ⌛ Add loading animations to a Shiny output while it’s recalculating 🔗
colourpicker 🎨 A colour picker tool for Shiny and for selecting colours in plots 🔗
shinybrowser 🌐 Find out information about a user’s web browser in Shiny apps 🔗
shinydisconnect 🔌 Show a nice message when a Shiny app disconnects or errors 🔗
shinytip 💬 Simple flexible tooltips for Shiny apps WIP
shinymixpanel 🔍 Track user interactions with Mixpanel in Shiny apps or R scripts WIP
shinyforms 📝 Easily create questionnaire-type forms with Shiny WIP

Table of contents

How to use

Using {shinyscreenshot} is as easy as it gets. When you want to take a screenshot, simply call screenshot() and a full-page screenshot will be taken and downloaded as a PNG image. Try it for yourself or watch a short tutorial!

It’s so simple that an example isn’t needed, but here’s one anyway:

library(shiny)
library(shinyscreenshot)

ui <- fluidPage(
  textInput("text", "Enter some text", "test"),
  actionButton("go", "Take a screenshot")
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  observeEvent(input$go, {
    screenshot()
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Sponsors 🏆

Become a sponsor for {shinyscreenshot}!

Screenshot button

The screenshot() function can be called any time inside the server portion of a Shiny app. A very common case is to take a screenshot after clicking a button. That case is so common that there’s a function for it: screenshotButton(). It accepts all the same parameters as screenshot(), but instead of calling it in the server, you call it in the UI.

screenshotButton() creates a button that, when clicked, will take a screenshot.

Features

Save to server example

The example below uses the server_dir parameter to save the screenshot to the server instead of downloading it to the user’s browser. As proof that the file was saved on the server-side, a preview of the file is shown. You can change the download = FALSE parameter to TRUE if you want to both save to the server and also download the file.

library(shiny)
library(shinyscreenshot)

ui <- fluidPage(
  plotly::plotlyOutput("plot"),
  screenshotButton(download = FALSE, server_dir = tempdir(), id = "plot"),
  h2("Preview of screenshot:"),
  imageOutput("preview", width = "50%", height = "200")
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  output$plot <- plotly::renderPlotly({
    plotly::plot_ly(mtcars, x = ~wt, y = ~mpg)
  })
  
  output$preview <- renderImage(deleteFile = TRUE, {
    req(input$shinyscreenshot) 
    list(src = input$shinyscreenshot, width = "100%", height = "100%")
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Installation

For most users: To install the stable CRAN version:

install.packages("shinyscreenshot")

For advanced users: To install the latest development version from GitHub:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("daattali/shinyscreenshot")

Motivation

For years, I saw people asking online how can they take screenshots of the current state of a Shiny app. This question comes up especially with interactive outputs (plotly, timevis, maps, DT, etc). Some of these don’t allow any way to save the current state as an image, and a few do have a “Save as image” option, but they only save the base/initial state of the output, rather than the current state after receiving user interaction.

After seeing many people asking about this, one day my R-friend Eric Nantz asked about it as well, which gave me the motivation to come up with a solution.

Browser support and limitations

The screenshots are powered by the ‘html2canvas’ JavaScript library. They do not always produce perfect screenshots, please refer to ‘html2canvas’ for more information about the limitations. Leaflet maps often have trouble with screenshots, and unfortunately this is a known issue that canont be fixed.

The JavaScript libraries used in this package may not be supported by all browsers. {shinyscreenshot} should work on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Chrome on Android, Safari on iPhone (and probably more that I haven’t tested). It does not work in Internet Explorer.

Similar packages

As mentioned above, the libraries used by {shinyscreenshot} do have limitations and may not always work. There are two other packages that came out recently that also provide screenshot functionality which you may try and compare: {snapper} by Jonathan Sidi and {capture} by dreamRs.

RStudio’s {webshot} package is also similar, but serves a very different purpose. {webshot} is used to take screenshots of any website (including Shiny apps), but you cannot interact with the page in order to take a screenshot at a specific time.

Credits

Logo design by Alfredo Hernández.