title: Pygame - Store surface as image
body: <p>This is just my second day at pygame, and I am not much aware about many functions. The following is a sample of what I am doing on my surface(window)</p>
  
  <pre><code>for c in nStations:
    pygame.time.wait( 20 )
    pygame.draw.circle( window, c.tColor, c.tPosition, c.iRadius )
    pygame.display.update()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is looped for <code>n</code> number of circles(in a tuple) to be displayed. Now, this will be repeated a total of 5-6 times. I wish to store/save the surface window as an image(or sub-surface) and put it as a thumbnail/link at the top-right-corner of my window.</p>
  
  <p>Is it possible? Or is <code>pygame</code> not a good library for this? I tried working on <code>cocos2d</code> too, but it's documentation is very poor as compared to <code>pygame</code>.</p>
  
  <p>In case my question didn't make any-sense anywhere, please reply. I'll keep updating it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>P.S.</strong> I've seen <a href="http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/surface.html" rel="nofollow">python.surface</a> library functions. and surface.copy seems to be what I am looking for, but can I store the surface as a thumbnail/image before copying and editing it further?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>->After reading jsbueno's reply, what I did:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  tThumbs.append( pygame.transform.smoothscale( window, (32, 32) ) )
    # the above statement inside drawing-circle loop
  
  i = 1
  for thumb in tThumbs:
    window.blit( thumb, (1050, 36*i) )
    pygame.display.update()
    i += 1
    pygame.time.wait( 200 )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The above seems to work perfectly for me. Thanks. :)</p>