

Show HN: Embed Full-Page Screenshots in any Blog / App / Whatever - dherken
http://www.url2picture.com

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condiment
This looks to me to be a page-for-page clone of another url screenshot service
that made it to the front page a couple weeks ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5257432>

Compare: <https://urlbox.io/docs>

<http://www.url2picture.com/Home/Docs>

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klintcho
Exactly what i was thinking as soon as i saw this one. Isn't urlbox free?

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calebegg
Doesn't appear to be: <https://urlbox.io/pricing>

It does have a 14 day free trial.

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SunboX
Even better, take Screenshots of any Website/App with just JavaScript and
Canvas: <https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas>

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dherken
Thats a great project, but I would need to host it myself somewhere?

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SunboX
nothing comes for free ;)

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lars
I'll chime in and say that the company I work for was ready to pay 1200$ for a
piece of software that we hoped would do this reliably. There are cheaper or
even free alternatives out there, but they all had different problems. If this
site is reliable and flexible, it is answering a real need in the market.

Does it render in webkit?

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dherken
Yes it uses webkit, and regarding reliability... It currently runs smoothly
despite the hacker news traffic increase ;-)

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lars
Sorry, I meant that as in reliably renders whatever you throw at it. This
where others would fail, i.e. sections of the page would be not be rendered,
or they would execute javascript, but the execution would fail half way
through,, it would crash if the site embedded certain resources, that kind of
thing.

~~~
dherken
It runs a full blown browser in the background so it should handle most things
you can throw at it.

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mmmooo
Someone's using a hash function where a MAC belongs..

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dherken
What exactly do you mean?

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mmmooo
you are basing your 'token' on md5(data+secret), however md5 (and other hash
functions) are easily extended when data and token are known, even without
knowing secret. Basically, given data and token, I can produce a different
token, that matches a (somewhat) different data, without knowing secret.

~~~
dherken
Sure you could, but then why would one go through all the hassle just to get a
(probably already cached) screenshot?

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mmmooo
well, for starters, I could use your (paid) account to get free screenshots.

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bpatrianakos
But if you knew how to do that then you could probably set up webkit2png in a
tenth of the time.

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mmmooo
True, but what you are saying is only complex applications need to be secure?

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jerkingerkin
You clearly were not ready for production. Please take your SaaS product
offline and fix it.

1) A Recursion vulnerability exists within your app - if I use your PHP sample
code to take a a screenshot of itself, your service blows up.

2) You embed a fully usable API key and token in your landing page. Line 254
and 255: var urlPart = "apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB79B4125BED74D19&url=" +
$('#tryurl').val() +
"&thumbnail_width=550&crop_height=440&width=1280&height=1024"; var token =
calcMD5(urlPart + "9A8E44104F064A5B9AD410F0F2DC9558");

You might want to fix that.

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dherken
You're right, I've added both to our bug list. Thanks for pointing that out!

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fpp
Kind of funny - you get German Google display ads in the screenshots - looks
like a headless webkit client (similar to phantomjs) - clear your caches
between the screenshots guys.

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dncarter
its an inferior copy of urlbox.io.

It doesnt render fonts / webfonts properly.

Website design and docs look really poor compared to urlbox.io.

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acketon
I see you have an option to crop the image... but what about offsetting the
crop? I've looked at a few of these services and no one seems to give that
option. I can process it myself but it would be nice to do it in one api call.
For example set viewport to 1200 x 1900, crop to 300 x 400 at 500px from the
top and 300px from the left. Or some coordinates from top and center
perhaps...

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jusob
<https://browshot.com/api/documentation#screenshot_thumbnail> , look at the
left/top/right/bottom options

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csytan
There's a bug when handling fixed-position layouts:

[http://www.url2picture.com/Picture/Png?apikey=6101EE5C99B145...](http://www.url2picture.com/Picture/Png?apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB79B4125BED74D19&url=www.nohuck.com&thumbnail_width=550&width=1280&height=1024&token=85c93bcf6499faae052fb262dc25c95e)

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dherken
Thanks for pointing that out! I'll look into that!

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hyperenergy
There doesn't seem to be pricing anywhere.

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dherken
You can find the Pricing on the Signup-Page:
<http://url2picture.com/Account/Register>

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dools
Anyone looking for a simple way to do this on an ad-hoc basis from their own
machine can check out this python script:
<http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/>

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thinker
Does it let you take a screenshot of the whole height of the page? I see that
you can specify the height of the viewport, but what if I want a whole long
screenshot of as much height is rendered?

~~~
dherken
Yes it does. See this example of the nytimes:
[http://url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB...](http://url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB79B4125BED74D19&url=http://www.nytimes.com&token=b0fdc5915f9eadb3bcbdfb380c954f8a)

Of course there are limits to this as some websites have "endless" scrolling
(like pintrest)

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sjs382
How does it handle responsive websites?

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dherken
You can specify the viewport size. For example the smashing magazine using
1024x768 viewport:
[http://www.url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B14...](http://www.url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB79B4125BED74D19&url=http://www.smashingmagazine.com&width=1024&height=768&token=5ef05af9a801090d1b5070b11b480259)

And using 400x400 viewport:
[http://www.url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B14...](http://www.url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB79B4125BED74D19&url=http://www.smashingmagazine.com&width=400&height=400&token=d0027100d5397ab5fe33a3cac903464d)

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jusob
The domain name and the home page look too much like http:/www.url2png.com/

~~~
url2png
Agreed. But as they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

:)

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pdenya
Niggling feedback: This is a tool for developers, it's awesome that you have
code on the homepage but I'd like to see that code:

\- Formatted in a way that I can read it without scrolling

\- Not using capitalized variables

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sergiotapia
In PHP it's a good practice to capitalize variables when they are "static".
(Not LITERAL static)

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sjs382
What's the market for this?

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dherken
Oh quite different: Mostly it's used to create images inside reports or to
display thumbnails for the user.

The Full-Page Screenshots is the main selling point at the moment...

