Using PHP to generate screenshots from an HTML source

Question

I've got an idea for a site that would generate png or jpeg screenshots of webpages on the fly. The end user would never see the pages, but the HTML would be turned into a screenshot instead and the end user would see that screenshot.

How can I get started on this? I guess what I'm looking for is some kind of PHP function that takes the HTML as an argument and then produces an image file in a specified location.

Answer 1

As far as I know, PHP does not do this.

You can, however, find a solution using external tools. Here is how I would do it

1. Generate the HTML
2. I would pass this HTML to a external tool using exec. There is, for instance this one.
3. Then, display the generated picture

Answer 2

http://www.zubrag.com/articles/create-website-snapshot-thumbnail.php