Capture Website Thumbnail without Security Concerns

Question

I've been looking for a way to navigate to a website URL and capture a thumbnail of what the home page looks like. I have found a solution on code project using the web browser control but people were saying it is not for production and there are security risks (malicious stuff on the web page, ect.)

Is there any 'safe' way to do this without worrying about downloading a virus, ect? It would be nice to capture the page as it really is, but perhaps the only way to do this is to disable javascript, etc. perhaps? I'm using asp.net c#.

Answer 1

You can use free online services within your application: 20+ Free Online Website Thumbnails Generators

After you register a free account on for example w3snapshot.com, you will be able to request thumbnails:

http://images.w3snapshot.com/?url=http://www.google.com&size=L&key=1234567890&format=jpg&quality=80

I think, you can select the one that will fulfill monthly/daily request limits for you.