Ask HN: Recommend a website screenshot API?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3482867

by dangrossman • 15 years ago

9 9 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm working on a bookmark organizer site to teach myself some new libraries/techniques, and I'd like to show ~200px screenshots of the bookmarked pages. Can anyone recommend a service to provide those screenshots? I did a search first and most of the years-old recommendations are no longer in business.

petewarden• 15 years ago

Though it meant a bit of server setup, I had a good experience using self-hosted PhantomJS. I have a mini how-to here, in the "Rendering the screenshot" section: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2011/11/how-to-p...

dangrossman4• 15 years ago

Thanks. That was easier to set up than I expected -- lots of prerequisites but all easy to install. I just need to figure out why the fonts are coming out wrong, then maybe it'll make more sense to set up a queue to build screenshots myself with this instead of paying for a service.

dangrossman4• 15 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/FLGH8.png

geekgyrl• 15 years ago

Here are two options. Webkit2png (free for Mac) - http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ Khtml2png (free for Linux) - http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/ Paid online api - http://url2png.com/

blazzar• 15 years ago

Can recommend url2png, very good service.

dangrossman4• 15 years ago

I like it too (really, thanks for the suggestion), but the pricing is way too high, by at least an order of magnitude. A single user might import 1000 bookmarks -- there's $10 right there.

Now that I've set up phantomjs (headless webkit) on a VPS per petewarden's suggestion, I can see what it costs to run a screenshot farm myself. A couple pennies per thousand images at most for bandwidth -- Linode's smallest instance can run a bunch of webkit instances in parallel just fine. I've already generated and resized almost 1000 screenshots since installing it all.

Ask HN: Recommend a website screenshot API?

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