[Sigia-l] Tool to automate generation of thumbnails of webpages?

[Listera]

"alfred at thunderstick.com" wrote:

> I have a need to generate many, possibly thousands, of thumbnails of
> snapshots of homepages.

I had the a similar need and couldn't find anything sophisticated enough for
this so I built a dedicated application a few months back.

It handles various user-settable parameters: Formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG, PICT),
Picture scale, Capture delay, Frame border and include/exclude of cursor,
browser address/favorites/status bars. It saves the pix into a database or
file sytem, logs Window Title, URL, Date/Time stamp, as well as optional
comments. It can export pix lists to text, clipboard , Excel or OmniOtliner.
It can generate more than a thousand captures/hour on a cable connection.

I never released it, mostly because it's really part of a larger proprietary
app and I never had the time to factor out just these functions.

You didn't mention what OS you're on. If it's OS X, there are some simple
ways you can do this. One is the "screencapture" CLI method:

It can be triggered from CLI (and thus also via AppleScript, Perl, etc.);
it's found in /usr/sbin/

screencapture          [-icmwsWx] [file] [cursor]
-i capture screen interactively, by selection or window
        control key - causes screen shot to go to clipboard
        space key - toggle between mouse and window selection modes
        escape key - cancels interactive screen shot
-c force screen capture to go to the clipboard
-m only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
-w only allow window selection mode
-s only allow mouse selection mode
-W start interaction in window selection mode
-x do not play sounds

file   where to save the screen capture

It's trivial to go to a URL via AppleScript and invoke screencapture, get
the pix into clipboard (-c), and do a paste into an app than can resize it.
If you know AppleScript, it'd be a fun project.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba