Add thumbshots to my listings - suggestions please!

[smn2]

Hi,

I want to add thumnail images of sites listed in my
directory, to the listings. I don't mind paying to do this.

I've looked at the following thumbshots services, and
wondered if anyone knew of something better:

* www.thumbshots.org (free, but only works if site exists on DMOZ)
* www.thumbshots.com ($29 per month, $49 setup - too much, right now)
* www.thumbnail.cz/price.html (doesn't seem to 'work')
* www.girafa.com/product2.acr (free for certain no. of images per day!)

I think the services above are limited by the fact that
many sites exclude them collecting the screen-shot via
a robots.txt file, so they're not able to collect the thumbnail
image of the site.

Maybe I don't need to use such a service, and can
simply collect the thumbshots myself, and store them on
my own server, etc. (I'm only after 200 images.)

So my 2nd question is does anyone know of an easy way for
me to do this?

I guess I could try and automate some kind of screen-capture,
and reduce the image to about 120 pixels. Just wondered if
anyone had done the same, and was willing to share

So, to summarise my ramblings a little, any suggestions to help me
(and maybe others) to add images to my site listings will be
gratefully received.

Cheers,
Steve

[smn2]

Anyone got any ideas?

[pricethat]

Image majic and GD library, both php libraries can do what you want to do. I think its image majic, not sure but if you look for image manipulation libraries for php then you will see that some of them have these functions. I know we use one of them to reprocess our images and we had to specify file extentions because if the merchant redirected a dead image link to a web page then we were importing screen shots of the site instead of just disregarding the product image.

If you cant find anything after a couple of days then shout and i will have to ask one of the programmers to have a look and explain what you need to do. Either of the above is free and does much more than any paid software i have seen.

[matbennett]

You could use GD or imagemagic to manipulate the images once you have got them, but I don't think that either would produce the screengrab of HTML output - which seems to be what you are after (could be wrong... sure that someone will correct me if I am).

I'd imagine that this is one of the few jobs that is easier to do on a windows server than a *nix one. Sure that a *nix box with a browser and a image capture program must be able to do it though.

If it isn't against the TOS then you might be able to use one of the services above to grab the images and then cache them locally. This would keep you well under the daily limits.

[Jack]

Has anyone ever used thumbshots.com for an affiliate site? Their FAQ has the following:

"You are not allowed to serve any advertisements in place of thumbshots or the area intended for thumbshots. Please contact us for Enterprise Solution if you want to serve ads."

- I'm not sure if that means you can't run ads anywhere on the page, or you can't make a thumbshot a clickabe affiliate link, or if it just means that you can't take one of their thumbshot images and write "my site is great" all over it. Anyone know? I have emailed thumbshots.com but no reply....

[Jack]

Just to answer my own question - they don't mind affiliate links at all.

And if anyone's interested this is what I did with their thumbshots - http://www.randomshopper.co.uk

[THiNK]

Alexa will help you for free : http://pages.alexa.com/exec/faqsidos...html?index=126

[Jack]

Cool. I guess that's a new service from Alexa? - I thought it wasn't allowed by their terms and conditions to link to the thumbnails, obviously that's changed.

[smn2]

Hi

I decided to use Girafa's solution (free for my purposes), but
the Alexa solution looks good too.

Cheers
Steve

[Jack]

With Thumbshots.com you can have any size screenshot you want and they will generate a thumbshot for a page when you request the thumbshot if they haven't got it already and you can get thumbshots for any internal page of a site, not just the homepage, so I think it's still probably the best - although it's not free!