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
- 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
- Sizes: 120×90
- Flash: yes
- Restrictions: none
Tends to be on the slow side.
Webseitentuning
- 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
- 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.