Question

I’m relatively new to python and know very little syntax, but I’m willing to learn as much as possible. Simply put I want to use the save feature in PIL to save a .png with the file’s name being the current date and time. This may be complicated by the fact that I’m not using PIL directly, but through the Videocapture module, but i doubt it. this is my code that works

from VideoCapture import Device
cam = Device()
cam.saveSnapshot('C:\Users\Myname\Dropbox\Foldes\image.png', timestamp=3, boldfont=1, textpos='bc')

Its short, but it does what I need it to.
I realize Datetime will need to be imported, But I can’t get the data as the name without errors. yes i have tried the str() command. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

'C:\Users\Myname\Dropbox\Foldes\image.png'

In strings in Python, backslashes have special meaning so you need to treat them differently. You can either use two of them instead of one…

'C:\\Users\\Myname\\Dropbox\\Foldes\\image.png'

…or you can put an r before the string (as long as it doesn’t end with a backslash)

r'C:\Users\Myname\Dropbox\Foldes\image.png'

---

To generate a string containing the current day in YYYY-MM-DD-HH:MM format, we can use the datetime module like this. To format the timestamp differently, consult the documentation here.

import datetime
date_string = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M")

As a shorter alternative, you could use the similar time module instead:

import time
date_string = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M")

After this, you should just be able to do

cam.saveSnapshot(r'C:\Users\Myname\Dropbox\Foldes\image-' + date_string + '.png',
                 timestamp=3, boldfont=1, textpos='bc')

to save the image with the datetime in the filename. (I have split the function call over two lines for readability, see this question for some explanation of how this works.)