7 Ways To Become More Productive With Capture Screenshot API

With our easy REST API, you can automate capturing screenshots. Enter the URL, and our robots will do the rest; you may record website screenshots, tweets, and social media updates, among other things.

A screenshot API is a tool that enables you to capture screenshot of web pages and images. It is also possible to use the API to record video from your screen or webcam. The API can be accessed with REST calls from any programming language.

Why do You Need Screenshot Capturing API?

Focus on your product’s core features, and offload screenshot rendering to screenshot API. Within 5 minutes, you can improve your UX with a screenshot. Say goodbye to the headache of scaling, monitoring and maintenance. Smart developers utilize screenshot taking services to create the best quality screenshots. By seeing how your product looks on different devices, you can analyze it and make a more promising UI and UX.

Let’s learn about one of the best market-leading screenshot taking services.

screenshotlayer is a lightweight REST API that uses a simple interface to produce high-quality PNG, JPEG, and GIF online screenshots at unbeatable speeds.

In 60 seconds, you can go from signup to programmatic screenshot using the screenshotlayer API. Stop spending time on open source solutions that aren’t well documented!

Our API uses a robust rendering engine capable of processing, storing, and retrieving all types of website material in just a few seconds to assure the most excellent possible image resolution.

• Screenshot’s URL
  • Within seconds, high-resolution PNG, JPEG, and GIF website screenshots are returned as an image URL compatible with any of your applications.
• API that is both simple and quick
  • Requested with a simple URL structure, processed by a powerful screenshot rendering engine, and delivered in seconds
• Optional Extras
  • Set your preferred thumbnail dimensions and viewport, add CSS, specify capturing delay, export to AWS S3 or FTP, etc.
• Easy on the wallet
  • Website screenshots should not be costly – 100 monthly shots are free – more is required. Subscriptions begin at $19.99 per month.

How to Get a Free Subscription API Key?

screenshotlayer provides its free subscription for testers so that you can integrate and check out how our system works with limited options.

Just head over to the pricing web page and get your free API access key right now!

How to Integrate screenshotlayer API Into Any App?

Capturing a screenshot with screenshotlayer API is simple. It would be best to utilize the essential endpoint with the required parameters. 

Here you can see that in order to make any API request, two required parameters should be included in the request URL:

• access_key
  • Located in your Account Dashboard
• url
  • Website URL that you want to take a snapshot

If the target website URL has special characters, you should encode it first and pass it.

Here is the final request sample:

How to Make Custom Snapshots?

screenshotlayer is different because of the various configuration it gives. Based on how you desire to configure your snapshot, you can specify more than a dozen parameters if you want.

Here are some of them given a summary of what they can accomplish for you.

• fullpage – you can put 1 to get a full-height
• width – default is 1:1, but you can specify your preferred thumbnail width in pixels
• viewport – give your desired dimensions in pixels – default is 1440×900
• delay – here, you can specify the screenshot delay in seconds
• user_agent – here, you can alter the User-Agent HTTP header to send your request
• export – export snapshot via custom FTP path or using your AWS S3 user details
• ttl – with this parameter, you can define the time in seconds your screenshot should be cached

This is a sample API request call:

As you got this point, you might be wondering about a complete demo application on this API? Here is a sample code is written in PHP.

HTTP User-Agent Headers

The screenshotlayer API sends no HTTP User-Agent headers with your request by default. By appending a custom user-agent string to the user agent parameter of the API, you can specify a custom user-agent string.

How to Export to AWS S3

If you have a Professional or Enterprise Plan, you can ask the API to export your snapshot directly to your AWS S3 Bucket. Just append your S3 Bucket path (format: s3:/API KEY: API SECRET@bucket) to the API’s export parameter.

Below is an example query that asks the API to export a screenshot of http://tumblr.com directly to an AWS S3 Bucket.

How to Export to FTP?

Professional and Enterprise customers can also specify a custom FTP path to which captured snapshots should be exported. By appending the FTP server path into the export parameter, you can directly save websites’ snapshots to that directory. It might take around one minute, but it works smoothly.