timed screen grabs of web page image

January 12, 2007 12:49 PM

Is there a Mac application out there that will take a screen shot of a web page graphic that changes frequently? Something that will run in the background (grabbing then adding to a folder) once I set the URL?
posted by sharksandwich to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Not a full solution, but Webkit2png will give you a command-line program that can save a web-page as a PNG. If you know your way around a command-line you can use it to build your own solution with most of the hard work already done.

There's a GUI app called Paparazzi which does similar things, but I've never used it.
posted by alana at 1:12 PM on January 12, 2007

That sounds like a five-minute job with curl and crontab. But does the actual filename/URL of the image change or are we talking about repeatedly downloading domain-name.com/img/image.jpg with different local filenames to prevent overwriting?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 1:56 PM on January 12, 2007

curl -s -o ~/path/to/save/dir/$(date +%s).jpg http://site.org/picture.jpg
posted by 31d1 at 5:45 PM on January 12, 2007

CronniX plus the curl command above should work fine.
posted by Hankins at 8:18 PM on January 12, 2007

sweet, I wrote a cocoa app to capture the the West Coast Satellite pic but a cron job makes more sense. . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 9:37 PM on January 12, 2007