13 screengrab webservices for web applications.
There comes a day in every developers life where he has to find a way of taking a direct screengrab of a URL. Whether that be for a custom search engine, or just to make things pretty. So how do you best go about doing that? Well. There are two options. One you can generate the images yourself, save them to a directory in a batch process, or use webservices..
If you do decided to go down the batch process DIY route, and you are on a linux machine, try this or this method. Alternatively if you are on a Windows machine, and want to use a batch process try Snapshotter. or IEShot IECapt
Webservices on the other hand are a completely different animal, and provide a much easier, on the fly way of grabbing a page image. Unfortunately, some of them are not free and have the added problem that some of your URL’s may not yet have a captured image, and thus could potentially be blank. Anyway here’s the ones I’ve found.
Amazon AWS
Pricing: ($0.20 per 1000 requests)
URL: http://aws.amazon.com/ast/
Unfortunately its not a freebie, but the amazon web service does provide larger organisations reliable thumbnail generate with their platform. It is currently in use on many high profile sites, and if you are a corporate user, it probably is one of your best options. The service currently can be seen in use at Alexa. There are also options if you wish to integrate with AJAX, with libraries such as the Alexa Ajax Thumbnails PHP Library that we found on codeproject.
Bluga WebThumb
Pricing: 100 free credits per month
URL: http://webthumb.bluga.net/home
Bluga is one of the better web thumbnail generation services out there. They have a full restful API and Fast response times, with most snapshots generated under a minute. They offer multiple formats (JPEG and PNG). However if you are planning on requesting a shed load of thumbnails, probably best to get in touch for rates. It may not be terribly obvious from the site itself, but they don’t allow super heavy access for free.
ThumbShots
Pricing: Free or $4.99 a month. More detail pricing here.
URL: http://www.thumbshots.org/
The thumbshots project offers free thumbnails under an attribution license, so as long as you are willing to link back to them, you can ‘ave em for free. If you decide you need the service without the attribution back to thumbshots, you can signup for $5 a month.
BrowserShots
Pricing: Free
URL:http://api.browsershots.org/xmlrpc/
Browsershots some of you will already know and love. They are a web developers wet dream when it comes to testing out a new site in multiple browsers. However they have a relatively unknown service that is of course, an API which links up to their screenshots requests.
WebsiteScreenShot
Pricing: See here.
URL:http://www.websitesscreenshot.com/
A commercial asp.net web site screenshot tool, this is a .NET library which simplifies the screencapture process. You could of course write your own component for a fraction of the price, in fact I’m seriously considering doing so, as this isn’t that difficult to do. Personally I think you’d be nuts to shell out the dough for this one, considering the other free options available out there. None the less, hats off to the lads for having a go at making a quick buck.
SnapCasa
Pricing: 300,000 Free Monthly requests.
One of the more Web 2.0 services out there, snapshot both looks and feels professional. Snapcasa is very fast which is one of the main reasons it receives such good press, in comparison with others. This will appeal to a broad array of web developers looking to spruce up their site and increase traffic.
Best of the rest
URL:http://www.shrinktheweb.com/
URL: http://www.thumbalizr.com/
URL: http://www.pageglimpse.com/
Anyone else know of any other service worth a mention? Drop me a comment.
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Paul is a regular 28 year old web bloke / programmer with a penchant for online marketing. This blog is a personal outlet, with an eclectic mix of articles.Subscribe
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Hi, Paul
I’m floored by the timing of this post. Just today, I started playing with Jing for video capture. Apparently, it’s part of TechSmith (techsmith.com) which gives us SnagIt and Camtasia Studios. For screenshots, I am smushy-in-love with SnagIt. Of course many of these on your list are strong resources. And strong resources make me happy. Thanks for sharing.
You need to correct the url for IEShot
Thanks Dean,
Hadn’t spotted that. Turns out its actually called IECapt – don’t know where I got IEShot out of. Ah well. Thanks for stopping by.
Thanks for sharing a very comprehensive list of website image generation services. I have used SnapCasa and it was great. On my latest project I am using sitethumbshot.com. It is low cost and generates high quality images without error. Surprisingly it is very fast. I would recommend sitethrumbshot for many other good reasons which are difficult to list down here. Jefy
That is a great list of website thumbnail generation tools. I tool that I am using for my site is w3snapshot.com. This service is fast and reliable. Never experience any down time. Its billing system stands tall. Instead of monthly payment, it works on credit basis. You buy credit and start consuming them.