Screen Capture

cesarcesar

i want to do a screen capture/scrape of a page, resulting in a JPG or PNG that i could save in a dir of my choice. This capture needs to take place a few seconds after the page loads, to allow all JavaScript and Flash elements on page to load.

It would be great if i could also/just target a specific JS or Flash element to grab, instead of the whole page. There has to be some great PHP solutions for this.

Thanks, Cesar

NogDog

I suspect that PHP is not going to have an answer for you, since the graphical rendering of a page occurs on the client side, not on the server side where PHP is running.

cesarcesar

there has to be some type of server-side scripts and modules that can render a page server-side.

sitevista.com does it... why cant I?

NogDog

Those sorts of services are typically run across a LAN involving multiple computers running different OS's and running assorted browser types/versions. Then you need programs running on each of those "browser" computers that can be instructed by a message from the server to load a given URL in each browser, then take a screenshot of the result, which it then feeds back to the server. The server then looks for those files to be uploaded, probably using some file naming convention to associate all the screenshots with a particular page request.

So, yes, there would be some server-side scripting involved, but most of the hard work would be the programs running on the networked client computers to load the page, grab the screenshot, and upload it to the server.

MarkR

It is extremely nontrivial. In practice, you need to create an instance of a browser which will render into an offscreen area, then capture that. It's nontrivial because browsers can't easily be made to do this, and there are a lot of security/reliability issues. It also uses a lot of server-side resources.

If you have a real willingness to do it and adequate development resource, hosting resource etc to support a (fairly) clever solution, I have a framework I developed which can take screenshots of pages.

It's not in PHP however, instead PHP talks to a Mozilla-based application via sockets which runs an embedded mozilla browser.

Mark