On the fly webpage screenshots/preview?

[cpugeek]

Hi, I'm building a client side login for my clients and I need to have previews of the pages from a certain directory.No, I'm not talking about an <img> tag i'm wanting something to the effect of Snap.com's PreviewShot™.(Not in a tooltip) Does anyone know what I mean?Just like the Wordpress themes page, but instead the screenshots (previews) are on-the-fly so when I update a webpage it shows immediately.Any and All help is appreciated. :]

[Jerry62704]

Hi, I'm building a client side login for my clients and I need to have previews of the pages from a certain directory.No, I'm not talking about an <img> tag i'm wanting something to the effect of Snap.com's PreviewShot™.(Not in a tooltip) Does anyone know what I mean?Just like the Wordpress themes page, but instead the screenshots (previews) are on-the-fly so when I update a webpage it shows immediately.Any and All help is appreciated. :]

http://browsershots.org/Have you tried that cite?

[cpugeek]

Thanks, but not what I'm looking for.I'm looking for a solution I can implement into my code.Something that will get the webpage and create a screenshot and a thumbnail for the corresponding page.

[Ingolme]

You'd actually have to build somewhat of a browser in PHP to do that. Something that parses HTML and renders it into an image. It sounds pretty complicated to me, though maybe somebody has already developed a library that does that.

[jesh]

We do this, to an extent, when we render out PDFs of web pages in our site. The PDF library we use uses IE in the back end to render out the HTML and then the PDF library creates the PDF from an image of that rendered HTML.Depending on which server-side language you are using, you might be able to go along a similar route.Maybe this link will help:http://mashable.com/2007/08/24/web-screenshots/One of the products on that page looks promising - it says it offers command line usage:http://www.websitescreenshots.com/

[aspnetguy]

You'd actually have to build somewhat of a browser in PHP to do that. Something that parses HTML and renders it into an image. It sounds pretty complicated to me, though maybe somebody has already developed a library that does that.

There are tools out there:http://www.guangmingsoft.net/htmlsnapshot/html2image.htm (costs $300 per server, Linux or UNIX only)http://www.converthtmltoimage.com/Index.html (costs $35 per user, Windows only)These are both command line tools so you have to have have admin rights to the server (this is probably not possible in a shared hosting environment unless the host is providing a solution already installed).