My colegue bl8cki is real fan of making screenshots from web browsers. Those days he tries the python solution. And today he surprised all with one very nice firefox plugin
With this plugin you can use firefox with some command line parameters to make screenshots.
Here is how we will use it
- start the xvfb
mkdir /tmp/tmpfbdir Xvfb :1 -ac -screen 0 1600x1200x24 -fbdir /tmp/tmpfbdir - run the firefox
firefox-2 --display=:1 --no-xshm -height 1024 -width 768 -savepng http://www.cenite.com
Windows solutions
http://webscripts.softpedia.com/script/Image-Galleries/Image-Tools/Website-Thumb-Generator-40121.html
http://web-tourist.net/login/login/view.php?st=1193 h
ttp://www.download32.com/website-thumbnail-generator-software.html
http://www.zubrag.com/scripts/website-thumbnail-generator.php
Multiplatform – I cant manage to compile it:
http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/ http://iecapt.sourceforge.net/
Python:
http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/mozilla-thumbnail-20040614?showcomments=yes#
Firefox
http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146
Another Linux/Ubuntu way:
aptitude install xvfb xfs xfonts-scalable xfonts-100dpi libgl1-mesa-dri subversion libqt4-webkit libqt4-dev g++
svn co https://cutycapt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cutycapt
cd cutycapt/CutyCapt
qmake
make
xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" ./CutyCapt --url=http://www.google.com --out=example.png
xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" ./CutyCapt --url=http://www.google.com --out=example.html --out-format=html
http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=faq
J September, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Web requests. From here you can request screenshots for your webpages:
http://browsershots.org/http://www.cenite.com/
J February, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Hello,
I was wondering, how can i make a php script that will run this command on my server so that i can acces apage on the brower, pass the url i wanna take the screenshot at and make it.
thanks.
J February, 2010 at 7:39 pm
you can run CutyCapt in php without any problem it is the most easy way to do it
From 1200 websites I have noticed that each solution has blocked or generated empty thmbnail at least once.
If you want to use it for real you have to use some commersial product :( sorry for saying it.
I am currently stick on one comersial firefox plugin running in framebuffer. The plugin is not hacked but we have to make a lot of coding around the capturing to save our thumbnails in the way we want.
J February, 2010 at 3:18 am
What a great script. I have tried this and it works really good on my ubuntu jaunty… However there are some issues i encountered.
1. Not able to capture flash content.
2. Is the a way to capture long urls? like http://www.xyz.com/cool/?re=mx&do=th9484 . i keep getting errors trying to capture thumbnail from these urls.
Hope to get a response. Thanks again guys