CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phppythonscreenshotserver-side-scripting
Colargol
Colargol

Reputation: 769

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

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:

Upvotes: 19

Views: 25039

Answers (4)

Frank Vielma
Frank Vielma

Reputation: 19

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

Upvotes: 0

Can Berk Güder
Can Berk Güder

Reputation: 113420

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:

Upvotes: 14

Ólafur Waage
Ólafur Waage

Reputation: 70041

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)

Upvotes: 7

Aziz
Aziz

Reputation: 20765

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 ;)

Upvotes: 2

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