How do I wait for pyautogui.locateonscreen() to return a value?

Question

I am creating a webbot and I want to wait for a certain image to appear on the webpage before I continue my script.

I am making use of pyautogui.locatesonscreen() function, but I can't find a way to keep locating the object until it appears.

My script just seems to run the locateonscreen function once before it returns a value of none - I want it to keep looping untli it finds the image.

Answer 1

You can loop the script:

import pyautogui
image = pyautogui.locateOnScreen("image.png")

#Searches for the image
while image == None:
    image = pyautogui.locateOnScreen("image.png")
    print("still haven't found the image")

#When program finds image, print the location
print(image)

Answer 2

I know this post is two years old, but I found this asking the same questions and the provided solution does not work with pyautogui v0.9.41 and above. So here's my own:

import pyautogui


location = None
imageFile = 'image.png'

while (location == None):
    try:
        location = pyautogui.locateOnScreen(imageFile)
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)

print(location)

From pyautogui.readthedocs.io: NOTE: As of version 0.9.41, if the locate functions can’t find the provided image, they’ll raise ImageNotFoundException instead of returning None.

Answer 3

Don't know why but the above solution is not working for me! maybe because it is looking for 100% match of the image, so to prevent this exception use confidence parameter! you can see more about it at PyAutoGUI’s documentation!

import pyautogui
import time
game_over =False
time.sleep(5)
while not game_over:
    try:
        x1, y1=pyautogui.center(pyautogui.locateOnScreen("./pyautogui_img/green_tik.JPG", confidence=0.7)) 
        time.sleep(2)
        pyautogui.moveTo(x1,y1)
        print('Hurray! image found')
        game_over = True
    except:
        print(f'image not found trying again in next 5 seconds. ')
        time.sleep(5)

The above code is going to look for an image and if not found then going to try again in next 5 seconds, until the image not found it will keep running! and also to use it make sure you installed opencv and pillow too.