Free Website Thumbnail Services

Nearly a year ago I posted an article on website thumbnail services. Today many of the sites I mentioned are no longer working. Time for an update – here is a list of currently available free website screenshot services:

WebSnapr

Link: http://www.websnapr.com
Sizes: 92×70, 202×152, 400×300, 640×480
Flash: yes
Restrictions: “powered by websnapr.com” watermark

Reliable but has a huge queue.

ArtViper

Link: http://www.artviper.com/tools.php
Sizes: any
Flash: no
Restrictions: backlink required

Be sure to use the cropping parameters or your thumbnails will look like crap because of bad scaling.

Website Thumbnails

Link: http://www.websitethumbnails.net
Sizes: 120×90
Flash: yes
Restrictions: none

Tends to be on the slow side.

Webseitentuning

Link: http://www.webseitentuning.de/screenshots.php
Sizes: 196×147, 300 x 225
Flash: yes
Restrictions: backlink required

The page is in German but it shouldn't be to hard to figure out (Google translate should help).

Thumbnails Pro

Link: http://thumbnailspro.com
Sizes: any
Flash: yes
Restrictions: backlink required

The site mentions to be free “during Beta period” so this might change in the future. You can watch their queue processing in a live AJAX view, but its no fun processing takes ages, which makes me wonder how they would cope with high demand.

Update (Aug. 25th) I've got an email from one of their programmers about them having tuned the image processing. Looking at their AJAX indicator, speed seems really to have improved a lot.

Thumbalizr

Link: http://www.thumbalizr.com
Sizes: any up to a width of 1024
Flash: yes
Restrictions: “powered by thumbalizr” watermark

They just launched today and are on heavy load currently. Nice twist: get a thumbnail of a whole page, not just a screen.

Summary

The quality of the thumbnails has increased very much since last year. Nearly all services support rendering Flash and none of them seems to have any problem with my CSS styles. I'm currently using ArtViper for my Linkblog, but I will probably switch to a Flash supporting service. Thumbalizr seems to be a good choice, but I'd like to wait a few weeks to see how they cope with popularity.

BTW: I did not add Snap Shots because they haveno easy way to insert thumbnails without JavaScript.

Tags:: thumbnails,; webservices

Similar posts:

Posted on Thursday, August the 23rd 2007 (3 years ago).

Hi Andreas, it seems that Mashable has had a similar idea. Maybe the post interests you:
http://mashable.com/2007/08/24 … reenshots/

2007-08-24 22:36:45

kuranai

Good catch, kuranai. But they seem to focus on manual creation of thumbnails and screenshots while my focus is on services to use in an automated way. I left a comment over there, pointing to this post.

2007-08-25 14:19:38

Andi

Very nice article Andy. I tryed all the services you describe and used ArtViper until they stop working. The other services don't get to work fine for me. However I found iwebtools - http://thumbnails.iwebtool.com/
Looks like they are very good. Check it out.
Greetings Niki

2007-09-16 18:31:14

cybertrone

artViper is also capable of rendering flash - and in addition you can now omit the parameters for width / height and / or screensize - if no paramter is given, standard values will be used.

And - artViper is still online :)

2007-10-06 13:32:27

Frank

Picoshot - http://www.picoshot.com is another free service I have started using. Seems pretty quick with the updates.

2007-10-16 01:57:26

Ernie

Hello Andy,

I would like to create website preview thumbnail like you did in your blogs link webpage with artviper.
Do you have a quick tutorial ?
Thanks in advance,

Fred

2007-11-21 07:54:27

Fred

check out exalead

2007-12-30 12:46:55

I ended up using Snapcasa which provides free web page snapshots. Their service offers several different thumbnail sizes and the snapshots always appear really fast without the “Thumbnail Queued” image I used to get from other similar services. I also like how there is no script need to use it just an img tag in my html. Best of all its on their servers so I don’t have to use my system resources (web page snapshots take a lot) to generate thumbs. The site is snapcasa.com

Thanks

2008-02-13 01:37:33

Greg

Thanks Scapture.com do it too. And you can choose your between FF2, 1 , opera etc...

2008-02-28 09:25:59

GirlsoutWest

I noticed that http://www.websitethumbnails.net has also now bitten the dust.

For your next update, please consider taking a look at http://www.shrinktheweb.com. This completely free (no daily or monthly limits) service generates thumbnails much faster, incorporates all of the features found at all the major providers, and has a wide range of features and options. :)

Thanks.

2008-04-01 11:46:56

Brandon

Nice article. I prepared this webpage http://www.4icu.org/ws.htm to see the results of some of the above services for 2 different URLs.

For some reasons I was not able to make work both Snapcasa.com and MyThumbnail.net. Not sure if there is something wrong in the code I included or in their service.
I personally like the flexibility and outcome of ArtViper.com despite being a bit slower compare to others.
What I do not like of most free services are the standard (and really ugly) images when error are encountered or URLs are queing. I would prefer a transparent image or a customised one prepared by the owner of the site. I guess being free services I should not complain.
Nice up-to-date comparison is also available at http://designerside.com/articl … s-compared

2008-09-13 12:10:05

Fabio

I guess one good site to use is http://www.sitethumbshot.com/. they provide very good services. i am using it and i had no problem. basic subscription is free and covers a lot. even if you go up, it wont cost you a lot. check rates page:
http://www.sitethumbshot.com/p … ervice.php

2009-09-10 20:29:28

Ping Ball

Can any one compare sitethumbshot.com with websnapr.com. I am planning to buy sitethumbshot paid service. Any suggestion.

2010-01-05 20:25:29

simons