Which third party website thumbnailing services do you use?

Question

I've got a requirement for showing thumbnails of arbitrary websites. I need to be able to show small thumbnails (120px by 90px), and larger thumbnails of around 480px wide. I'll need to specify the queue and invalid placeholder images and preferably have a pingback when the queued images are processed so I can respond appropriately. I'd also need a simple API I can use either directly embedded in my HTML, or from a simple web request to queue the images.

I've been looking at various services ranging from low-fi services, to large scale ones - here's some examples:

www.bitpixels.com

Uses Google AppEngine, seems like a prototype or a toy. Free!

www.websnapr.com

Tried using this, made a free account and requested a thumbnail. Waited a few minutes and refreshed a couple of times, and ended up having the account banned. Free is tricky yes, but if I can't try it out successfully I'm disinclined to pay.

www.shrinktheweb.com

Free account seems to be very quick. Lots of documentation on the site, and even covers local caching of the images to your own server (documentation mostly in PHP). Quality of thumbnails look good, and there appear to be sufficient options for setting thumbnail placeholder images and parameters for altering how the thumbnailing is done. Also supports large 'screenshots' of URLs - very useful for me. Discovered the PRO pricing is an à la carte menu, allowing me to select just the features I want and keep the monthly cost low. Excellent stuff, have decided to use this service.

www.thumbalizr.com

Good coverage of thumbnail sizes and control options - even allowing specification for browser width when thumbnailing. No ping-back, but I can live without that. Supports local caching of images with PHP API, would prefer .NET, but can port it if necessary. Looks like a fairly professional service but seems fairly expensive for the number of thumbnails you get to generate.

apologies for lack of proper linking - spam protection!

I'm not entirely convinced by any of them, and since this will be a long term service I'd like some stability and support. I'm willing to pay for the service, but I'd want something that fulfills most if not all of my requirements for that.

I should also mention that we're hosted on Windows under IIS, so local solutions involving Xvfb and the like sadly can't be used for this project.

So my question is: what services do you use? How have they panned out, are you happy with them?

Answer 1

I've been looking for such a service some time ago but could not find a perfect one. In the end I've settled with http://snapcasa.com/

Pros:

• supports flash
• free to up to 300k request per month (100k not watermarked)
• 4 sizes of thumbs in free version
• returns a placeholder for unprocessed request (can be customised in paid version)

Cons:

• can serve thumbs to registered IP only, not per API key basis (if you distribute your app to clients, you will have to register their IP on your account as well)
• some websites seems not to work (got 'snapshoot queued' image for weeks)
• thumbs are somewhat compressed too much

It serves my purpose for now but since I coulnd't find a perfect one, I decided to implement such functionality directly in my app at later stage, check these links:

http://blog.whirix.com/2007/05/screenshots-of-web-pages.html

http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/

Good luck

Answer 2

I'm very surprised you didn't try shrinktheweb yet, but now that you've tried the rest; you'll see the difference. So I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say that there is a BIG difference over all of the other similar services. Go to our homepage and click on the 'more' link above the testimonials.

Snapcasa, in fact, stops generating new thumbnails on a regular basis for weeks or even months at a time. This we have been told by many who have switched over the past year. If reliability is important, then ShrinkTheWeb is the only answer (based on customer feedback).

I would be curious to know why you bothered to try all the other services and saved ShrinkTheWeb for last. Did our website miss telling you something important to your project? We have lots of documentation and some sample code and are currently overhauling the site to be easier to locate both.

Cheers,

-The Brandon

Answer 3

Hi Ben,

Thank you for testing out our service and for your feedback. We will most likely be simplifying the homepage a bit over the next few months thanks, in part, to your comments. We want to be sure that others are not also "overwhelmed" at first, because we feel that our offering is strong and look forward to showing that to new users.

Best of luck to you on your project!

Brandon