How can I generate a screenshot of a webpage using a server-side script?

Question

I need a server-side script (PHP, Python) to capture a webpage to a PNG, JPG, Tiff, GIF image and resize them to a thumbnail.

What is the best way to accomplish this?

See also:

• Web Page Screenshots with PHP?
• How can I take a screenshot of a website with PHP and GD?
• How might I obtain a Snapshot or Thumbnail of a web page using PHP?

Answer 1

What needs to happen is for a program to render the page and then take an image of the page. This is a very slow and heavy process but it can be done in PHP on Windows.

Also check the comments in the documentation article.

For python I'd recommend reading this article. It highlights some of the solutions.

There are services you can also call (via some API) that will return you an image. But usually they cost (WebShots for example)

Answer 2

You'll need to:

• read the webpage and all the its multimedia content (images, flash, etc)
• utilize a browser rendering engine to render the webpage
• take a screenshot and save it as image

first and third steps are easy, the second step is more challenging ;)

Answer 3

WebSwoon can help with that, it automatically can save the displayed web pages as images.

Answer 4

You can probably write something similar to webkit2png, unless your server already runs Mac OS X.

UPDATE: I just saw the link to its Linux equivalent: khtml2png

See also:

• Create screenshots of a web page using Python and QtWebKit
• Taking automated webpage screenshots with embedded Mozilla

Answer 5

If you are using php, you could use imagegrabscreen (PHP 5 >= 5.2.2). Imagegrabscreen: captures the whole screen.