Screenshot a URL through PHP (GD??)

[SurgeProto]

Is it possible to give php a url and take a screenshow of it somehow? I was wondering if the GD library or some other existing classes could handle this. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, I'm very stumped on this.

[leatherback]

Hi Surge,

I am 99.999% confident that the answer would be.. Hope. Unles somehow you have a set of browsers installed, you call those to open the page on your server, do a screendump, and serve that.

Each page is rendered different in different browsers, so there is no 'correct' screendump.

[MarkR]

This is extremely difficult. I know because I have done it.

Basically you need to:

• Invoke a web browser or web browser component somehow on an invisible screen on your server
• Instruct it which web page to navigate to
• Wait for it to finish rendering the page
• Ensure that it does not open any unwanted popups, dialogues etc (e.g. SSL warnings, HTTP authentication, which might be built into the browser)
• Somehow snapshot the screen
• Get that into PHP somehow

Some of these steps are extremely difficult and would involve significant hackery on to existing browsers (especially waiting for it to finish loading).

It also tends to use up a lot of server resources.

There are existing web services which will do this work for you; I strongly recommend you find and use one of those (unless you enjoy the intellectual challenge of doing it yourself; I did).

Mark