

Webkit2png: Python (cmd) tool that creates png screenshots of webpages - whalesalad
http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/

======
kqueue
I prefer CutyCapt.

<http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/>

~~~
waleedka
Their site says: "Qt double-escapes % characters in addresses, meaning those
cannot be loaded".

That sounds like a major issue, isn't? Using % in a URL is very common.

------
waleedka
Can someone recommend a similar tool that runs on Linux and can render flash?

~~~
ChuckN
python-webkit2png mentioned above does and it runs on xvfb which is extremely
handy.

------
anathema
If anyone's interested, I ported this into a Ruby Gem a couple of years back.
I haven't given it too much love lately, but it should still be good/useful:
<http://github.com/jurisgalang/snapurl>

~~~
sailormoon
This is probably the wrong forum but there is a mistake in the regex in the
makeFilename method. In trying to detect https it will strip the first letter
of any domain starting with s. Check it out:

    
    
      >> name = 'http://super.com/'
      => "http://super.com/"
      >> name.gsub!(/\W/, '')
      => "httpsupercom"
      >> name.gsub!(/^http(s)?/i, '')
      => "upercom"
    

Cool, though ; )

------
3ds
Then there is the aviary.com browser plugin where you can get an image version
of the website you are viewing and even upload it directly to host (and edit)
it on their site:

[http://aviary.com/viewfull?fguid=a1c828de-96b6-102d-a9f3-003...](http://aviary.com/viewfull?fguid=a1c828de-96b6-102d-a9f3-0030488e168c)

usually they also provide a service where you can go to URLs like this to get
an image (the plugin is faster though):

[http://aviary.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125638...](http://aviary.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1256381)

------
xal
I build a web service for this in my spare time: <http://www.web2png.com> .
You can set up profiles where you select the resulting resolution of the
screenshot and apply all sorts of effects like polaroid frame, drop shadows
and stuff like this. Once created you get a special URL through which you can
get screenshots of web sites using your specifications.

Do you think this may be worth $19 a month? I provide a jquery plugin which
makes this all really easy..

~~~
tptacek
Who would it be worth a monthly fee to? Answer that question first.

------
ptomato
There's also a gui OS X tool that does the same thing.

<http://derailer.org/paparazzi/>

------
aphyr
We use a modified webkit2png, along with some ruby and erlang RPC stuff, to
take thumbnails of flash videos at vodpod.com. It works great!

~~~
deno
Wouldn’t something like getting the actual video file (flv or h.264) be a
simpler approach? I mean don’t you have to have some kind of sandboxing etc.
since you are executing unknown code (swf)?

~~~
aphyr
Oh, believe me, I'd _love_ to. The difficulty, however, is that extracting
H264 or FLV streams from embed codes is a process that every video host is
actively attempting to thwart--and there's some 15,000 of them, and one of me.
:)

------
coderholic
I released PyWebShot today, which does a similar thing for Linux, but
generates thumbnails (or arbitrary size) rather than whole page images.
Details at [http://www.coderholic.com/pywebshot-generate-website-
thumbna...](http://www.coderholic.com/pywebshot-generate-website-thumbnails-
using-python/) and code on GitHub

------
saurabh
Can this be ported to Windows?

EDIT: took a look at the source, it uses OS X specific API's.

~~~
swirlee
wkhtmltopdf renders web pages to PDF using WebKit and works great on Windows,
for what it's worth. It's just one more step to go from PDF to PNG. The
results were great when I used it, but I'm not sure how it deals with e.g.
Flash.

<http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/>

~~~
saurabh
thanks, i checked it out, i wish it could output png though.

~~~
3ds
either use aviary.com or:

all you need is imagemagick

wkhtmltopdf www.google.com google.pdf && convert google.pdf google.png

results aren't nearly as good as the browser addon but it works

------
paraschopra
I have used it on server and it works flawlessly. But you will need Xvfb on
server and X11-fonts installed to make it work.

------
Alcides
Such a tool has existed long time ago:
[http://softwarelivre.sapo.pt/projects/mac/wiki/WebPageRender...](http://softwarelivre.sapo.pt/projects/mac/wiki/WebPageRendererCLITool)

~~~
simonw
webkit2png is at least five and a half years old:
<http://simonwillison.net/2004/Sep/11/webkitpng/>

------
ChuckN
Python-Webkit2png is the best solution - believe me I've been through them
all, it's based off of Roland's script mentioned below and is on PyPI:

<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/webkit2png>

<http://github.com/AdamN/python-webkit2png>

-Adam

