Website screenshots

LAST EDIT: after 7 years I'm still getting upvotes for this answer, but I guess this one is now much more accurate.

Sure you can, but you'll need to render the page with something. If you really want to only use php, I suggest you HTMLTOPS, which renders the page and outputs it in a ps file (ghostscript), then, convert it in a .jpg, .png, .pdf.. can be little slower with complex pages (and don't support all the CSS).

Else, you can use wkhtmltopdf to output a html page in pdf, jpg, whatever.. Accept CSS2.0, use the webkit (safari's wrapper) to render the page.. so should be fine. You have to install it on your server, as well..

UPDATE Now, with new HTML5 and JS feature, is also possible to render the page into a canvas object using JavaScript. Here a nice library to do that: Html2Canvas and here is an implementation by the same author to get a feedback like G+. Once you have rendered the dom into the canvas, you can then send to the server via ajax and save it as a jpg.

EDIT: You can use the imagemagick tool for transforming pdf to png. My version of wkhtmltopdf does not support images. E.g. convert html.pdf -append html.png.

EDIT: This small shell script gives a simple / but working usage example on linux with php5-cli and the tools mentioned above.

EDIT: i noticed now that the wkhtmltopdf team is working on another project: wkhtmltoimage, that gives you the jpg directly

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Since PHP 5.2.2 it is possible, to capture a website with PHP solely!

imagegrabscreen — Captures the whole screen

<?php
$img = imagegrabscreen();
imagepng($img, 'screenshot.png');
?>

imagegrabwindow - Grabs a window or its client area using a windows handle (HWND property in COM instance)

<?php
$Browser = new COM('InternetExplorer.Application');
$Browserhandle = $Browser->HWND;
$Browser->Visible = true;
$Browser->Fullscreen = true;
$Browser->Navigate('http://www.stackoverflow.com');

while($Browser->Busy){
  com_message_pump(4000);
}

$img = imagegrabwindow($Browserhandle, 0);
$Browser->Quit();
imagepng($img, 'screenshot.png');
?>

Edit: Note, these functions are available on Windows systems ONLY!

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If you don't want to use any third party tools, I have come across to simple solution that is using Google Page Insight api.

Just need to call it's api with params screenshot=true.

https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v1/runPagespeed?
url=https://stackoverflow.com/&key={your_api_key}&screenshot=true

For mobile site view pass &strategy=mobile in params,

https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v1/runPagespeed?
url=http://stackoverflow.com/&key={your_api_key}&screenshot=true&strategy=mobile

DEMO.

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You can use simple headless browser like PhantomJS to grab the page.

Also you can use PhantomJS with PHP.

Check out this little php script that do this. Take a look here https://github.com/microweber/screen

And here is the API- http://screen.microweber.com/shot.php?url=https://stackoverflow.com/questions/757675/website-screenshots-using-php

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Well, PhantomJS is a browser that can be easily put on a server and integrate it to php. You can find the code in WDudes. They have included lot more features like specifying the image size, cache, download as a file or display in img src etc.

<img src=”screenshot.php?url=google.com” />

URL Parameters

Width and Height: screenshot.php?url=google.com&w=1000&h=800

With cropping: screenshot.php?url=google.com&w=1000&h=800&clipw=800&cliph=600

Disable cache and load fresh screesnhot: screenshot.php?url=google.com&cache=0

To download the image: screenshot.php?url=google.com&download=true

You can see the tutorial here: Capture Screenshot of a Website using PHP without API

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There is a lot of options and they all have their pros and cons. Here is list of options ordered by implementation difficulty.

Option 1: Use an API (the easiest)

ApiFlash (based on chrome)

EvoPDF (has an option for html)

Grabzit

...

Pros

Execute Javascript

Near perfect rendering

Fast when caching options are correctly used

Scale is handled by the APIs

Precise timing, viewport, ...

Most of the time they offer a free plan

Cons

Not free if you plan to use them a lot

Option 2: Use one of the many available libraries

dom-to-image

wkhtmltoimage (included in the wkhtmltopdf tool)

phpwkhtmltopdf

...

Pros

Conversion is quite fast most of the time

Cons

Bad rendering

Does not execute javascript

No support for recent web features (FlexBox, Advanced Selectors, Webfonts, Box Sizing, Media Queries, HTML5 tags...)

Sometimes not so easy to install

Complicated to scale

Option 3: Use PhantomJs and maybe a wrapper library

PhantomJs

php-phantomjs (php wrapper library for PhantomJs)

...

Pros

Execute Javascript

Quite fast

Cons

Bad rendering

PhantomJs has been deprecated and is not maintained anymore.

No support for recent web features (FlexBox, Advanced Selectors, Webfonts, Box Sizing, Media Queries, HTML5 tags...)

Complicated to scale

Not so easy to make it work if there is images to be loaded ...

Option 4: Use Chrome Headless and maybe a wrapper library

Chrome Headless

chrome-devtools-protocol

puphpeteer

...

Pros

Execute Javascript

Near perfect rendering

Cons

Not so easy to have exactly the wanted result regarding: page load timing proxy integration auto scrolling ...

page load timing

proxy integration

auto scrolling

...

Complicated to scale

Quite slow and even slower if the html contains external links

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of ApiFlash. I did my best to provide an honest and useful answer.

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cutycapt saves webpages to most image formats(jpg,png..) download it from your synaptic, it works much better than wkhtmltopdf

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I set up finally using microweber/screen as proposed by @boksiora.
Initially when trying the mentioned link here what I got:

Please download this script from here https://github.com/microweber/screen

I'm on Linux. So if you want to run it, you may adjust my step follow to your environment.
Here are the step I did on my shell on DOCUMENT_ROOT folder:

$ sudo wget https://github.com/microweber/screen/archive/master.zip
$ sudo unzip master.zip
$ sudo mv screen-master screen
$ sudo chmod +x screen/bin/phantomjs
$ sudo yum install fontconfig
$ sudo yum install freetype*
$ cd screen
$ sudo curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ sudo php composer.phar update
$ cd ..
$ sudo chown -R apache screen
$ sudo chgrp -R www screen
$ sudo service httpd restart

Point your browser to screen/demo/shot.php?url=google.com. When you see the screenshot, you are done. Discussion for more advance setting is available here and here.

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There are many open source projects that can generate screenshots. For example PhantomJS, webkit2png etc

The big problem with these projects is that they are based on older browser technology and have problems rendering many sites, especially sites that use webfonts, flexbox, svg and various other additions to the HTML5 and CSS spec over the last couple of months/years.

I've tried a few of the third party services, and most are based on PhantomJS, meaning they also produce poor quality screenshots. The best third party service for generating website screenshots is urlbox.io. It is a paid service, although there is a free 7-day trial to test it out without committing to any paid plan.

Here is a link to the documentation, and below are simple steps to get it working in PHP with composer.

// 1 . Get the urlbox/screenshots composer package (on command line):
composer require urlbox/screenshots

// 2. Set up the composer package with Urlbox API credentials:
$urlbox = UrlboxRenderer::fromCredentials('API_KEY', 'API_SECRET');

// 3. Set your options (all options such as full page/full height screenshots, retina resolution, viewport dimensions, thumbnail width etc can be set here. See the docs for more.)
$options['url'] = 'example.com';

// 4. Generate the Urlbox url
$urlboxUrl = $urlbox->generateUrl($options);
// $urlboxUrl is now 'https://api.urlbox.io/v1/API_KEY/TOKEN/png?url=example.com'

// 5. Now stick it in an img tag, when the image is loaded in browser, the API call to urlbox will be triggered and a nice PNG screenshot will be generated!
<img src="$urlboxUrl" />

For e.g. here's a full height screenshot of this very page:

https://api.urlbox.io/v1/ca482d7e-9417-4569-90fe-80f7c5e1c781/8f1666d1f4195b1cb84ffa5f992ee18992a2b35e/png?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F757675%2Fwebsite-screenshots-using-php%2F43652083%2343652083&full_page=true

https://i.stack.imgur.com/aNvYQ.jpg

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I'm on Windows so I was able to use the imagegrabwindow function after reading the tip on here from stephan. I added in cropping (to get rid of the Browser header, scroll bars, etc.) and resizing to get a final image. Here's my code. Hope that helps someone.

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I used bluga. The api allows you to take 100 snapshots a month without paying, but sometimes it uses more than 1 credit for a single page. I just finished upgrading a drupal module, Bluga WebThumbs to drupal 7 which allows you to print a thumbnail in a template or input filter.

The main advantage to using this api is that it allows you to specify browser dimensions in case you use adaptive css, so I am using it to get renderings for the mobile and tablet layout as well as the regular one.

There are api clients for the following languages:

PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .Net C#, Perl and Bash (the shell script looks like it requires perl)

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It all depends on how you wish to take the screenshot.

You could do this via PHP, using a webservice to get the image for you

grabz.it has a webservice to do just this, here's an article showing a simple example of using the service.

http://www.phpbuilder.com/articles/news-reviews/miscellaneous/capture-screenshots-in-php-with-grabzit-120524022959.html

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There are some ways in which you can achieve this in PHP, but realistically it's better to delegate this to a non-PHP based API which you can build yourself, or you can pay for. Many people have already listed screenshot APIs in the answers, and you can use any of those to achieve this. My own screenshot API is extremely well tested and covers many rendering cases that most APIs don't cover, but for most people, this is overkill, honestly.

My recommendation is to build your own API using Puppeteer, which is the canonical solution nowadays to build screenshot solutions. My service is built on top of Puppeteer and it really works well for most basic use cases.

You can build a serverless Puppeteer solution on AWS or GCP using something like https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrome-aws-lambda, which is an excellent serverless package for Puppeteer that comes pre-loaded with Chromium.

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You can use https://grabz.it solution.

It's got a PHP API which is very flexible and can be called in different ways such as from a cronjob or a PHP web page.

In order to implement it you will need to first get an app key and secret and download the (free) SDK.

And an example for implementation. First of all initialization:

include("GrabzItClient.class.php");

// Create the GrabzItClient class
// Replace "APPLICATION KEY", "APPLICATION SECRET" with the values from your account!
$grabzIt = new GrabzItClient("Sign in to view your Application Key", "Sign in to view your Application Secret");

And screenshoting example:

// To take a image screenshot
$grabzIt->URLToImage("http://www.google.com");  
// Or to take a PDF screenshot
$grabzIt->URLToPDF("http://www.google.com");
// Or to convert online videos into animated GIF's
$grabzIt->URLToAnimation("http://www.example.com/video.avi");
// Or to capture table(s)
$grabzIt->URLToTable("http://www.google.com");

Next is the saving.You can use one of the two save methods, Save if publicly accessible callback handle available and SaveTo if not. Check the documentation for details.

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After a lot for surfing on web I found this.

PPTRAAS > A free tool to capture screenshot by passing your URL as a parameter

They provide multiple options by simply hitting their URL.

Get full page screenshot https://pptraas.com/screenshot?url={YOU URL HERE} Get page screenshot of specific size https://pptraas.com/screenshot?url={YOU URL HERE}&size=400,400 One can even convert the page to pdf https://pptraas.com/pdf?url={YOU URL HERE}

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Not directly. Software such as Selenium have features like this and can be controlled by PHP but have other dependencys (such as running their java-based server on the computer with the browser you want to screenshot)

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you can use cutycapt .

kwhtml is deprecated and show page like old browser.

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I've found this to be the best and easiest tool around: ScreenShotMachine. It's a paid service, but you get 100 free screenshots and you can buy another 2,000 for (about) $20, so it's a pretty good deal. It has a very simple usage, you just use a URL, so I wrote this little script to save a file based on it:

<?php
  $url = file_get_contents("http://api.screenshotmachine.com/?key={mykey}&url=https://stackoverflow.com&size=X");

  $file = fopen("snapshots/stack.jpg", "w+");
  fwrite($file, $url);
  fclose($file);
  die("saved file!");
?>

They have a very good documentation here, so you should definitely take a look.

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