Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#1

Post by rezaman » Sun, Oct 23, 2011, 11:17 PM UTC

Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy
instantscreenshot.com

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#2

Post by iamjustlooking » Sun, Oct 23, 2011, 11:43 PM UTC

Doesn't load external fonts from services like Google web fonts so it creates inaccurate screenshots for a lot of websites. An issue with QtWebkit, that is assuming this uses PhantomJS.

example (quicksand font not loaded): http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/ac

http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Quicksand

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#3

Post by rezaman » Sun, Oct 23, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

I'm not sure how useful is for everyone else, but I always thought grabbing a screenshot of a url could be improved.

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#4

Post by TreesCanCode » Sun, Oct 23, 2011, 11:52 PM UTC

http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/8i

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#5

Post by zacharycohn » Mon, Oct 24, 2011, 12:05 AM UTC

It failed when I tried to use it on www.timecube.com. That may have been a cruel first test, but I just wanted you to know.

Otherwise, this is great. I was JUST looking for a tool to do this on Friday.

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#6

Post by rezaman » Mon, Oct 24, 2011, 12:18 AM UTC

zacharycohn wrote: post #5

It failed when I tried to use it on www.timecube.com. That may have been a cruel first test, but I just wanted you to know. Otherwise, this is great. I was JUST looking for a tool to do this on Friday.

Yea, it's not quite polished just yet so you get the occasional failure to load a screenshot. I figured I'd gauge interest before dumping a bunch of time to clean up the edge cases.

Also, I just did timecube and it looks like it's working for me: http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/b1

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#7

Post by rezaman » Mon, Oct 24, 2011, 12:23 AM UTC

iamjustlooking wrote: post #2

Doesn't load external fonts from services like Google web fonts so it creates inaccurate screenshots for a lot of websites. An issue with QtWebkit, that is assuming this uses PhantomJS. example (quicksand font not loaded): http://instantscreenshot.com/screenshot/ac http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Quicksand

Thanks. I'll put it on the list.

As for PhantomJS, I hadn't heard of it. I was originally rendering the screenshots with Selenium and the FirefoxDriver. They came out looking good, but performance was abysmal and when a page froze up I needed a mechanism to kill firefox manually.

Now I'm using Wordpress's Mshots service, but I'm looking at a couple of python tools to generate headless screenshots.

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#8

Post by ArtemZ » Mon, Oct 24, 2011, 12:48 AM UTC

it takes really much time for it to take a screenshot

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#9

Post by jusob » Mon, Oct 24, 2011, 2:39 AM UTC

It seems to be a popular idea this week-end: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144066 (Browshot.com)

Re: Show HN: Website Screenshots Made Easy

#10

Post by pplante » Mon, Oct 24, 2011, 4:28 AM UTC

Have you looked into using: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

I have used it on two projects in the past and found it very easy to use, but incredibly powerful. If you check it out, try out one of the more recent RC builds as they contain functionality the stable release does not.