Create a thumbnail screenshot of a website that is submitted to website directory

Question

I would like to know how to set the thumbnail of a screenshot of a website when someone submits that site to my directory. It would need to be automatically generated.

See an example

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 26 '13 at 07:39

1

There is a good service to do this but I'm afraid it's not available in English (only French or Spanish): http://robothumb.com.

answered Jul 26 '13 at 07:39

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 27 '13 at 11:03

I use Selenium and Firefox.

Selenium is a browser automation scripting framework with an API so that it can be called from a variety of programming languages. It allows you to remote control Firefox:

Create a new window of a specific size
Open a URL in that window
Save the visible portion of the webpage to an image (like a screenshot)

To make this work on a server, you have to get Firefox running "headless" in a virtual frame buffer.

Create a thumbnail screenshot of a website that is submitted to website directory

2 Answers2