ASP Screen Capture

No budget (as it's for a charity)

[chris_f]

Hi Peeps,

I was wondering if someone could help. I'm developing a project that requires a screen capture to be made and saved as an image.

I am coding in ASP and have no budget (as it's for a charity). I have searched high and low for a component to perform the screen capture but cannot find anything.

Does anyone know of a component that works like below:

1. I feed it a URL
2. It goes off and performs a screen capture of the URL
3. The screen capture is saved as a file.

Cheers,
Chris.

[mattglet]

ASPTear should be able to do the job for you. Not sure if you're on a shared or dedicated server, but most shared hosts have either ASPTear or ASPHttp. Otherwise, do a search for "asp screen scrape", and you'll come up with a ton of articles. While nothing will perform an actual "capture", it will get all the HTML for you, and you can just show the HTML normally.

Not sure if you have any .NET knowledge, but you can do it with about 3 lines of code.

[chris_f]

Hi Matt,

I've looked into ASPtear but it seems to fetch the code and not produce a screenshot. Am I wrong?

ASP.Net is an option but a last resort (therefore, if you know of a solution - please suggest).

The server is dedicated.

Regards,
Chris.

[mrMister]

Thumbshots is your best bet. Easy to integrate and open source. It's open source.

[thumbshots.org...]

[chris_f]

I'm alittle confused with the service but am looking into it.

Thanks.

[mrMister]

Hmm, actually, I was wrong. It's not open source. That might put a spanner in the works if you want images that are any bigger than thumbnail size.

[emsaw]

Chris_f,

I have not used it, but search for:

khtml2png

it's free, and it seems that you can just point it to a URI with a couple of other parameters and it will output a snapshot of the page for you.

-mark

[chris_f]

Hi Mark,

It's perfect with one exception. This is a windows box and the program in unix.

Cheers Anyway,
Chris/

[emsaw]

chris_f,

It would help if I actually paid attention to all of the details you wrote :P

Again, I've never tried it, but search for URL2BMP
-Mark

[chris_f]

Hi Mark,

It's still not ASP, however, I should be able bodge a link.

Thanks,
Chris.

[emsaw]

Apologies. I should have specified>> I was thinking you could use something along the lines of

dim wshell, intReturn
 set wshell = server.createobject("wscript.shell")
 intReturn = wshell.run ("URL2BMP [parameters] ")
Response.Write intReturn
 set wshell = nothing

-Mark

[dataguy]

There is a component that will work as an ActiveX component available from tonec called "Web Page Snap Shot". It is used by some major web sites to make thumbnail images of web pages.

I believe it is free for non-profit use.

[asp4bunnies]

web page snap shot has a free version that has an ugly watermark on it.

However, there's a major memory leak in the component that has yet to be addressed. if your site does heavy amounts of thumbnailing, your server will need to be rebooted frequently.