How to do create a thumbnail of many sites?

Question

I've got a list of 2500 websites and need to grab a little screenshot of them - to create a thumbnail

How do I do that? Well I could try to parse the sites.

Either with Perl or Python

Answer 1

If you just need a screenshot / thumbnail, then it is probably best to use one of the many existing thumbnail generator services around.

This site for example allows 5000 free screenshots a month (with a daily limit of several hundred) and has an API, so if you have a list of URLs in a file, you could create a script that did something like:

 wget http://www.shrinktheweb.com/api?site=http://thesite.com

The above is just made up, you'll have to read their api docs to work out how best to access the api, but just repeat the command for each site.

wget can be obtain here for windows, and if you are using linux it will probably be installed already, but otherwise it will be available in the repositories, so use the package manager to install.

Answer 2

Agree with Paul's advice, but if you really want to do it on your own, then I would look at the Perl module Image::Magick::Thumbnail, which has a fairly simple interface - you just load up the image using the Image::Magick module, then pass the resulting object to Image::Magick::Thumbnail::create and write the resulting object back out to disk.