I'm writing a webapp where I want to display screenshots of other websites. Is there any free service out there that does this? I'm thinking something RESTful, for example if I wanted to get a screenshot of Google I'd request it with something like this:
http://www.somesite.com/screenshot.jpg?url=www.google.com
I kind of doubt this. Screenshot... rendered in which browser, which operating system, which version? Sounds tricky, to say nothing of the copyright issues this implies.
BrowserShots.Org has links at the bottom of the page for an XML service, a download link and the source code for their capture engine.
You have two options that I know of:
The free version of webshots pro is pretty slow and there is no api but they do have a $5 a month option which I guess does what you want and has an API.
thumbalizr is in beta and at the moment it is free and reasonably quick. the api is pretty much exactly what you specified too:
Simple syntax to use the API:
http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=http://www.ford.de&width=250
dzone.com does that and looking at the screen shot of theirs looks like they have some chron job that captures and creates an image and put it in their server and displayed as image. may be it's a good service to write not sure if checkbrowser has API to do it programmatically.