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What is the best way to create web page thumbnails?

Is there any reasonable cross-platform way to create a thumbnail based on a URL? I know that there are miniature web services that will do this, but I want a piece of software or library to do this locally. I assume that on Linux, I could always create a browser window using a headless X server, but what about Windows or OS X?

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image thumbnails
Sep 15 '08 at 17:48
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3 answers

You can use Firefox or XULRunner with a fairly simple XUL to create thumbnails as PNG dataURL (which you could then write to a file if necessary). Robert O'Callahan has excellent information about him here:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/05/rendering_web_p.html

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Sep 15 '08 at 18:18
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I know that you said that you want the service to be local, but ... if you need to connect to the Internet to take a screenshot, you must also have access to the web service. This seems to be better done than discovering yourself for cross-platform issues related to a local screenshot.

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Sep 15 '08 at 18:05
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There are a number of commercial packages that will do what you want. I am not sure if you are reading your question if this requirement is free. But here are some apps that I found that are reasonably priced and that do exactly what you want. I have not used them myself, but they have free sample downloads so you can evaluate them before you buy.

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Sep 15 '08 at 18:13
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