website thumbnail generator

alex

I'm looking for recommendations for a website thumbnail generator. It's for generating thumbnails in DomainAgent. Any size would do, and it has to be free.
Any help appreciated!

telephone

Most of the free services can be bogged down (slow response) due to mass requests.

I'd recommend using PhantomJS to capture your own screenshots/thumbnails. All you have to do is download the binary (1 file, and works on any Linux OS).
With PhantomJS, you're looking at 100 MB ram usage on OpenVZ.

^ New versions of PhantomJS are true headless (no X11), but they no longer capture flash. If you wish to capture flash within screenshot/thumbnail, you'll need to build v1.4.1.

Note: You could easily create your own API for your project

Mun

could always use shrink.munroenet.com/shrink.php

Example format: http://shrink.munroenet.com/shrink_new.php?img=http://forums.gaming-servers.net/uploads/FileUpload/87/4484b8a8122186ea2c79e6b511757b.png&comp=35&h=400&w=300

where:
img= URL path
comp= compression percent
h= height
w= width

I might make the script open source, but im not fully happy with it

Mun

vld

function generate_thumb($url) {
    $data = json_decode(file_get_contents('https://developers.google.com/_apps/pagespeed/run_pagespeed?run_dependency_analysis=off&format=json&url='.urlencode($url)), true);
    if(isset($data['status_code']) && $data['status_code'] == 'OK') {
        return array('title' => $data['document_title'], 'image_binary' => base64_decode($data['image']['data']));
    }
    return false;
}

I wrote this a while ago and it served me well. Returns a 320x240 jpeg image. Probably Google doesn't like it, but, eh.

DalComp

@Mun said:
could always use shrink.munroenet.com/shrink.php

I think your script is for resizing images, much like timthumb, but doesn't generate the website screenshot itself.

@vld said:
I wrote this a while ago and it served me well. Returns a 320x240 jpeg image. Probably Google doesn't like it, but, eh.

Is that "stealing" from Google Pagespeed? Nice. lol.

thuvienvps

@vld said:

> function generate_thumb($url) {
>   $data = json_decode(file_get_contents('https://developers.google.com/_apps/pagespeed/run_pagespeed?run_dependency_analysis=off&format=json&url='.urlencode($url)), true);
>   if(isset($data['status_code']) && $data['status_code'] == 'OK') {
>       return array('title' => $data['document_title'], 'image_binary' => base64_decode($data['image']['data']));
>   }
>   return false;
> }
> 

I wrote this a while ago and it served me well. Returns a 320x240 jpeg image. Probably Google doesn't like it, but, eh.

How to make it working?

vld

@thuvienvps said:
How to make it working?

Just an example, make sure you sanitize the title (if you're going to output it to the user) and the filename. You can add some more error cases if desired.

<?php
$image_file = 'thumb.jpg';
$thumb = generate_thumb('lowendtalk.com');
if(is_array($thumb) && file_put_contents($image_file, $thumb['image_binary'])) {
    echo $thumb['title'].' has been saved to '.$image_file;
} else {
    echo 'error';
}
?>

awson

Speaking of abusing internal APIs, I think it might be possible to take advantage of Chrome World Wide Maze's website generation app. I'll take a look at it in a while.

vedran

As @telephone suggested, do it yourself with PhantomJS, it's very simple to use it and it works amazingly well.

alex

@vedran said:
As telephone suggested, do it yourself with PhantomJS, it's very simple to use it and it works amazingly well.

Not a chance. It is a PHP script that is to be deployed by people which won't have a clue how to do it.

vedran

What I meant (and what @telephone suggested) is making your own API, I wouldn't rely on a third party public free API. Some time ago I was looking for the same thing, and whatever I found was either terribly slow, limited, or already dead.

alex

nah, not going to reinvent the wheel

prae5

Check out http://snapcasa.com/

Its lists lots of sites that do it, last time i checked a number of them offered free / limited api levels.

I used a couple for a project once but ended up disabling the feature, as it wasn't the greatest idea in the end.

alex

tried it already, most of them is crap, however this one looks primising:
http://pagepeeker.com/free-thumbnails/

Abdussamad

You can leech off WP.com servers:

http://www.webmaster-source.com/2010/02/16/automated-website-thumbnails-via-wordpress-com/

vahe

I think you're looking for something like this: bitpixels.com

matt_securedspeed

PagePeeker is a popular free one that I see used quite a lot. They put their logo in the bottom corner of the image tho unless you pay to use the service.