Web Site Screenshots

I've seen this topic come up regularly on developer discussion lists, forums, etc. What people want to do is to, given a URL, get a screenshot of that page, possibly a thumbnail of it, etc. The reasons are wide-ranging. Some want to be able to put a thumbnail next to a link, as part of a portfolio list, on CD versions of a site (what I want them for), etc. In short, though it doesn't matter why you want them, suffice it to say that lots of people want them.

So, when I found IECapt the other day I was pretty excited. It's a commandline app for Windows that takes a URL and an output filename as arguments and it takes a full page screenshot of the relevant URL. It uses the IE rendering engine, though not the full version of IE. This is an important distinction if you want to use it (though there is a more kludgy way of doing it for "real" if you want and I can detail that later) as it won't pick up any IE sessions you have, cookies, etc. It will render the page as it appears to a raw, new user.

So, what you get is a long PNG or JPG of the entire page. Unfortunately for some of the sites, that can result in a huge JPG. What I wanted was a thumbnail in regular monitor aspect ratio and scaled down. So, using PHPThumb (I'm really starting to like that thing), I used the crop and resize/resample filters and get a 300px thumbnail of a URL.

You can try out the demo script at: http://www.pragmapooldev.com/sitecap/

It will stay up until I feel like taking it down. Keep in mind that it's running on my home DSL test server and we all know how reliable my DSL has been lately.

See the code itself and how to set it up here