Library (API) for the website snapshot

September 24, 2008 4:06 AM

How to save a snapshot (image) of a webpage programatically.

I have a small bot that is crawling specific websites and I would like to store an low-res image of the front page once in a while.

Environment I am running at is Ubuntu and I would be very thankful if you could point me to any Python or Perl libraries I could use for this purpose. I

t could be well that I am taking this task too lightly since just a script would be not enough and once would need a complete browser environment for correct rendition. If you also could point me to any public API that could be accessed for this purpose, it would be great.

posted by chexov to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Selenium gives you an API like this:

   browser = new firefoxbrowser;
   browser.open('http://foo.com/');
   browser.grabScreenshot('/tmp/foo.jpg');
   browser.close();

It's also supports all kinds of browser interactions, if you want to do more than just grab the front page.
posted by you at 4:54 AM on September 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

You could use browsershots for this, which features an API.
posted by slater at 5:18 AM on September 24, 2008

webthumb. The first link on the google search is a paid for public API. Looks simple to use. Further links include Linux software that'll do this for you.
posted by seanyboy at 6:04 AM on September 24, 2008