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Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

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Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#61

Post by ALittleLight »

jot wrote: post #59
ALittleLight wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at your urlbox - pretty funny language around the quota system. >What happens if I go over my quota? >No need to worry - we won't cut off your service. We automatically upgrade you to the next tier so you benefit from volume discounts. See the pricing page for more details. So... If I go over the quota you automatically charge me more? Hmm. I would expect to be rejected in this case.

I’m sure we can do better here. In my experience our customers are more worried about having the service stop when they hit the limit of a tier than they are about being charged a few more dollars.

Maybe I'm misreading. It sounds like you're stepping the user up a pricing tier - e.g. going from 50 a month to 100 and then charging at the better rate.

I would also worry about a bug on my end that fires off lots of screenshots. I would expect a quota or limit to protect me from that.

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#62

Post by throwaway314155 »

wildzzz wrote: post #52
gkamer8 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the catch on my LinkedIn, I really should have that there now. It was originally something I kept private.

Thanks, I'm always on the lookout for people with suspicious or over-exaggerated credentials cough-Lex Friedman-cough . Is the national security paper public? Is it something about Ufimstev?

> cough-Lex Friedman-cough

Oh please elaborate!

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#64

Post by caelinsutch »

kevinsundar wrote: post #53

I'm looking for something similar that can also extract the diff of content on the page over time, in addition to screenshots. Any suggestions? I have a homegrown solution using an LLM and scrapegraphai for https://getchangelog.com but would rather offload that to a service that does a better job rendering websites. There's some websites that I get error pages from using playwright, but they load fine in my usual Chr…

The easiest solution to this is probably extracting / formatting the content, then running a diff on that. Otherwise you could use snapshot testing algorithms as a diffing method. We use browserbase and olostep which both have strong proxies (first one gives you a playwright instance, second one just screenshot + raw HTML).

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#65

Post by OptionOfT »

manmal wrote: post #6

Being a bit frustrated with Linkwarden’s resource usage, I’ve thought about making my own self hosted bookmarking service. This could be a low effort way of loading screenshots for these links, very cool! It‘ll be interesting how many concurrent requests this can process.

Have you looked into Wallabag?

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#66

Post by bbor »

gkamer8 wrote: post #48
bbor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) Thanks for sharing your OSS with the world!! B) I'm also a little confused. Surely that domain cost(s) $$$ -- why not go with a cute "us" branding rather than "U.S."? Unless you're looking to sell in other countries where maybe U.S. expertise is a selling point, this definitely comes across like you're pretending to be part of the government. EDIT: For comparison, we.ai costs $500,000/y (!!!) EDIT2: It looks like…

Hi thanks! The domain actually used to be a redirect link to U.S. Automotive Industries (a trade publication). I reached out to them and got a deal, so it was a lot for me but not, like, we.ai expensive lol. The name was always a corporate placeholder and I liked the idea of US Steel or General Electric type names. Some startups have done similar things, and many people actually like the name a ton. But I know it's c…

Ok that’s actually kinda hilarious — hopefully some blogger picks up that tidbit. I bet there aren’t many people using “ai” for “automotive industry” anymore!

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#67

Post by ranger_danger »

cmgriffing wrote: post #33
xnx wrote: post #4

For anyone who might not be aware, Chrome also has the ability to save screenshots from the command line using: chrome --headless --screenshot="path/to/save/screenshot.png" --disable-gpu --window-size=1280,720 " https://www.example.com "

Quick note: when trying to do full page screenshots, Chrome does a screenshot of the current view, then scrolls and does another screenshot. This can cause some interesting artifacts when rendering pages with scroll behaviors. Firefox does a proper full page screenshot and even allows you to set a higher DPS value. I use this a lot when making video content. Check out some of the args in FF using: `:screenshot --help…

Where would you type that command in?

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#68

Post by bbor »

basilgohar wrote: post #47
bbor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these services respect norobot manifests? Isn't this all kinda... illegal...? Or at least non-consensual?

robots.txt isn't legally binding. I am interested to know if and how services even interact with it. It's more like a clue on when the interesting content for scrapers is on your site. This is how I imagine it goes: "Hey, don't scrape the data here." "You know what? I'm scrape it even harder!"

Soooo nonconsensual.

Maybe bluesky is right… are we the baddies?

Re: Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots

#70

Post by jchw »

One thing to be cognizant of: if you're planning to run this sort of thing against potentially untrusted URLs, the browser might be able to make requests to internal hosts in whatever network it is on. It would be wise, on Linux, to use network namespaces, and block any local IP range in the namespace, or use a network namespace to limit the browser to a wireguard VPN tunnel to some other network.
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