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16 Comments

What's a good tool to automate a couple screenshots per day?

I'd like to screenshot a website a couple of times a day, automatically and at specific time points.

What's a good tool to do this? Ideally free or not bank breaking.

  1. 3

    I've made a research on the topic recently.

    There're no free tools unfortunately.

    These tools are top in my research:

    Also, take into account different services produce different results (fonts, resolution, other page rendering options).

  2. 2

    Blit seems to be what you're looking for. It's a paid tool with a free trial.

    1. 2

      I should add, a no-code type tool. I'm not prepared to dive into any code stuff. 🙄

      1. 2

        Ahh I see.

        What's your use case? It shouldn't be too hard to whip up real quick, I can send it to you if you'd like?

        1. 3

          I find it interesting that there are paid services for web screen capturing. I would have never thought that people would pay for something like that.

          I've used PhantomJS for web screen captures. If there is no authentication involved, it's super easy:

          https://phantomjs.org/screen-capture.html

          var page = require('webpage').create();
          page.open('http://github.com/', function() {
            page.render('github.png');
            phantom.exit();
          });
          
          1. 1

            Yeah I find it interesting too! I have half a mind to code something up and put it out there

      2. 1

        You could use the free-tier Octoparse which has an automation feature and then just point it to the way back machine archive(dot)org. It's basically visual programming. Never used it before for this specifically, but I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work.

        Like @ronnieQM is suggesting below. The coding solution is probably only a few lines of code with an HTTP Client and System.IO to save the file.

    2. 1

      I was about to suggest Python + Selenium too.

      It's free and really not that tedious to code up.

    3. 1

      Yup, seems like there's webscreenshot [1] (did a quick google search ). Then you could use AWS lambda and trigger it every x minutes/hours/etc with CloudWatch events [2].

      [1] - https://pypi.org/project/webscreenshot/

      [2] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35272697/invoke-aws-lambdas-regularly-every-1-minute

  3. 1

    Well, it seems that you are talking about a web scraping tool.
    You can try Octoparse, which is no-coding and has an automatic detecting feature meeting your demand.
    The latest version of the product is even simpler to use: https://www.octoparse.com/blog/octoparse-85-empowers-the-local-web-scraping/?indie=

  4. 1

    Visualping comes to mind, but tons of options that do this :)

  5. 1

    Would think Python as my first goto suggestion for anything that needed to be automated, but seeing as it was already suggested and denied how about something a little more tricky.

    You could setup a windows scheduled task, to open the web page in chrome. Then another scheduled event when the browser window is open, to open a program that will take a screenshot. Something like Snagit would work well here.

    Easy to setup w/ times you want and you can set it up to close out when you're done. For added productivity, you could get anything you screenshot to add to a folder that's being saved to your DropBox for easy sharing.

    Zapier Hook to Gmail, or Drive, Google Sheets depending on need or being able to share the screenshot; automate sharing anything new that's in your DropBox folder.

  6. 1

    Hey Rosie,

    Playwright is a very good tool to do this. You can set it up if there is any changes in the screenshot, and you don’t have to check everything.

    And it’s free.

  7. 1

    Hi @rosiesherry,

    This is already on our radar at Snippyly.com - we're aiming to launch such feature by end of March. Stay tuned, I'll make sure to update you once it's live :)

  8. 1

    Hey @rosiesherry, I just recorded video for you showing how I am doing it. https://youtu.be/rQSJlYCJvCw

    I take a lot of screenshots every day, and its because the screenshots are my eyes into Automatio, so I can see what Automatio see.

    Let me know if you need access.

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