How to Take a Screenshot on the LG G Watch
So this probably isn’t a tutorial that most people will use, but if you’re a developer, tech writer, or someone who REALLY wants to show off their LG G Watch’s screen for some reason, taking screenshots can be invaluable (let’s be honest, they look way better than taking a pic of the watch’s screen). Now, normally on any Android device, you can easily do this by holding down a button combination, either volume down and power or home and power depending on the device, but that doesn’t work on the LG G Watch for one big reason: it has no buttons.
No worries though, we can still take screenshots, but you’ll need to be quite stationary as it requires you to use ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to manually type a command to take a screenshot from your computer, then use another command to manually copy that screenshot from the Android Wear device over to your computer so you can use it. If that didn’t just sound like way too much effort for a screenshot, then here’s the breakdown for getting it to work.
I. Install and Setup the Android SDK and ADB
1. Head to our How to Setup ADB tutorial (complete with video by the way), follow it to setup ADB on your computer, then return here to continue.
II. Enable USB Debugging on the G Watch
1. Head to our How to Enable USB Debugging on the G Watch tutorial, complete it so that you see a serial number during the last step, then return here to continue.
III. Take a Screenshot on the G Watch
1. Plug your LG G Watch into your computer via the USB cable and dock it came with.
2. On your computer navigate to C:/android-sdk/platform-tools/ (or wherever your platform tools folder is if you didn’t follow our ABD procedure).
3. While holding shift on your keyboard, right-click any blank space in that platform-tools folder and select Open Command Window Here.
4. Put your G Watch’s screen on whatever you want to take a screenshot of.
5. In the newly opened command window, type the following with hitting enter at the end of each line (each time you take a screenshot, change the screenshot1.png part to a different name or it will override the first one):
adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/screenshot1.png
6. Copy the screenshot to the computer by typing the following into the command prompt and hitting enter at the end of the line:
adb pull /sdcard/screenshot1.png
7. You can find the newly copied screenshot inside your platform-tools folder.
IV. Taking Multiple Screenshots
Quick tip for if you plan to take a bunch of screenshots at once is to make a folder on the device called screenshots and capture the screenshots in there so you can then adb pull the entire folder at one time instead of each individual screenshot over and over…
1. In the command prompt type the following with hitting enter at the end of the line:
adb shell mkdir /sdcard/screenshots/
2. Take your screenshots by typing the following into the command prompt and changing the number in the screenshot name each time (i.e. /sdcard/screenshots/screenshot1.png then /sdcard/screenshots/screenshot2.png then /sdcard/screenshots/screenshot3.png, etc.):
adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/screenshots/screenshot1.png
3. To get all of the screenshots at once, type the following into command prompt with hitting enter at the end of each line:
adb pull /sdcard/screenshots/
4. And, as with the one screenshot at a time, your newly pulled screenshots will all be inside your platform-tools folder.
Now, while you have this new found ability to capture screenshots, why don’t you do some things in our LG G Watch How To’s section worthy of a screenshot, eh?
