The best free Screenshot Services
Websnapr 2.0:
websnapr lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page. Allow your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking. Increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness. websnapr screenshots can have four different sizes: micro (90px x 70px), small (202px x 152px), medium (400px x 300px) & large (640px x 480px). Websnapr is completely free of charge. Websites containing illegal, adult or offensive contents are not allowed. They also offer some premium services like “High traffic usage”, “White labeling”, “High resolution snaps”, “Snaps in high-quality”, “Shorter caching”. There are a bunch of great plugins too like the Snapr Wordpress plugin, a Drupal Module, a Windows Live Writer Plugin and many more.
Thumbshots:
Thumbshots.org is a screenshot service that provide thumbshots for links that appear in the DMOZ Open Directory. If the site is not listed in DMOZ, then it won´t be supported at thumbshots.org. They offer a commercial solution where every link is available and can be purchased at http://www.thumbshots.com.
thumbalizr
Right now thumbalizr.com is serving more than 76.415.772 thumbs. You can sign up for free for your own personal API-key. But there is no need to sign up. You can integrate a snapshot of any page you want with a single line of code. Quick and easy. They also offer a service were you can cache your images locally with PHP. For the different parameters on using thumbalizr have a look here: http://api.thumbalizr.com/
my Webshots
my Webshots if a free Website screenshot service that offers 2 variations: Managed/controlled previews or automatic / global link previews. The managed/controlled option allows you to place a website thumbnail anywhere you want, within your content, a listing, or even controlled via your own scripts and stylesheets. With the automatic / controlled option a single line of code on your page/template, automatically creates and displays Preview Bubbles of all EXTERNAL links on your page. Using my Webshots requires a free registration.
webshots.myfeedr.com
Hmmm…. webshots.myfeedr.com calls itself a “web 2.0 screenshot & thumbnailservice”. Why it is “web 2.0″? I really don´t know
Anyway. Using webshots.myfeedr.com from your site is easy. You just use a single line of code to generate a thumbnail. They offer thumbshots in 3 different sizes: 100px x 63px, 320px x 202px and 640px x 404px. They offer a jquery plugin which allows you to generate “tooltip screenshots” of external sites.Snapcasa
Take web page snapshots and website thumbnails of any site with SnapCasa. Place a simple img tag in your HTML page and the SnapCasa website thumbnail generator will provide a snapshot for you. You have to register for free. SnapCasa is offering snapshots in 4 different sizes: 100px x 75px, 140px x 105px, 200px x 150px and 280px x 210px.
Artviper website thumbnails
The artviper website thumbnail generator allows any size of thumbnails, snap subpages ( not only the tld ), realtime preview ( depending on how long the page which is snapped takes to load ), loads of parameters to suit your needs, update option and a lightning fast preview when images have been created already. They offer a few javascript / AJAX based link hover tools that will implement the service automatically to the links on your page. Simple ones like a bubble preview, and a bit more slick ones based on the mootools framework. (Only allowed for non-commercial domains.)
snap shots
With Snap Shots, users can mouse-over links to get the most appropriate shot of content for that link. Of course you can serve your users a snapshot of a website but “snap shot” offers some more things like “Audio Shot (AudioShot plays .mp3 files within a Shot and also displays information such as the track, the artist, the album art, etc., if they can be determined.)”, “MapShot (MapShot is incredibly useful because it displays a Google Map in a Snap Shot. Just visit maps.google.com, type the address, click “Link to this page”, and copy the URL.)” just to name two. So visit snap.com for more information.
Shrink the Web
ShrinkTheWeb was founded by Brandon Elliott of Neosys Consulting in an effort to provide a much needed service for webmasters. Brandon’s goal was one of offering a more powerful -and most importantly …Free- service to generate and display website thumbnails of any website on any website. In other words, STW will allow any webmaster who wants to show a mini-screenshot of a website to show them using this free service. Thumbnails are provided in 3 sizes: 120×90px, 200×150px and 320×240px. ShrinkTheWeb offers some nice plugins too.
So which one are you using? Did we forget something? I bet you have an opinion - so leave a comment and tell us
Great list. I did not know there were that many. Interesting about Thumbshots, only supports DMOZ listed websites.
Good list indeed, but you should update this blog with the screenthumbs.com service which is the most fully featured service that has free and paid use.