Automated screengrabbing

September 13, 2012 10:27 AM

I need to take regular full-screen screenshots of around 12 different webpages that all have similarly formatted URLs. Is there software that makes this easy, and preferably automates it?

The URLs will be website.com/social/username/profile, and I'd like to set it up to systematically capture each day if possible. I'm on Win7 if that makes a difference. I'm not adverse to a little bit of scripting if necessary, but would prefer a easy to use GUI. Thanks!

posted by codacorolla to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I've been playing with PhantomJs which is a headless webkit browser that can also take screenshots. They have very simple example on how to take a screenshot.

While there is no GUI, the scripting is all javascript (or coffeescript if you prefer). You could then schedule the task using windows a Scheduled Task
posted by ambirex at 10:46 AM on September 13, 2012

So you need to fully render a webpage and push it into a image file.

Python can do this: webkit2png, which is based off of this blog post.

Looking at the code, all this does is use PyQt4 to render the webpage and then store it using the QImage class.

So, given that all webkit2png is doing is using Qt, you can use any language that has Qt bindings, use this library/blog post as a template, and code accordingly.
posted by teabag at 11:23 AM on September 13, 2012

How about his app?

http://www.webpagethumbnailer.com/Index.html
posted by Dansaman at 12:29 PM on September 13, 2012