One of our first APIs just got a major redesign. The level of improvement we put into our Screenshot API wouldn’t give it justice to call this a Screenshot API 2.0. We’ve compared our Screenshot API to the ones that are out there, and if you think we “missed a spot” please let us know. And you want to know what’s the best thing? We are not going to increase our prices! Yes, prices are going to be the same as in 2017, and you are getting a major upgrade. As a matter a fact…
What about pricing? Get 50% off in next 30 days!
Old clients will get access to the new Screenshot API, while paying the same subscription. As for the new clients, they get a chance to try our new and revamped Screenshot API under very competitive prices compared to the usual suspects. However, as you can see from the title, in the next 30 days we have reduced our prices by 50%. THIS IS A LIFETIME DISCOUNT! So if you start paying under these prices, you get to keep them until you cancel your subscription with us.
What’s the big (difference) deal?
We like to use our own products, so our Screenshot API is no different. We use it in our Webmaster.Ninja tools (domain manager to be exact). In the past for some of the website we weren’t able to get the screenshot. You can see the result below. We would either get an error, an incomplete website, or a successful thumbnail.
OLD SCREENSHOT API USED BY WEBMASTER.NINJA
NEW SCREENSHOT API USED BY WEBMASTER.NINJA
How did we resolve this?
One of the things we did to resolve this issue is to trigger a screenshot at a different point in time. We learned that if we took the website screenshot immediately, we would miss a part of the website that loads later. Another common mistake is content that’s being loaded by Javascript. In the past, we’ve had problems with this, and this was resolved with core changes. We didn’t just “upgrade” our Screenshot API, we’ve rebuilt it from the ground up.
I can’t go into the specific details on how exactly we’ve built our screenshot API. But I can say that we’ve changed the main engine, added some of our custom upgrades, fixes and features. We’ve also updated the nodes where our Screenshot API is loading from. Based on your use case, our Screenshot API may fall short in some aspects. If that happens to be the case, please let us know what exactly happened, and what exactly is your use case.
What are the new Screenshot API features?
I’ve already mentioned “delay”, so let’s start with that one. Delay allows you to wait for the website to load completely before you take the website screenshot. It is very useful when the website or the page you are trying to load/take the screenshot is very heavy.
Next one is the ability to take a screenshot of any URL. So you aren’t limited to take a screenshot of the homepage.
This parameter we call “process”. Basically, you have to tell our Screenshot API if you want a thumbnail a full page screenshot or a combination of both.
We’ve prepared several different resolutions besides the default one 1366×768. So in case, you would like to get a website screenshot with resolutions 1366×768, 1920×1080, 1280×1024, 1280×800, 1024×768, just remember to put that in the HTTP request.
Thumbnails! We love them, we use them and apparently we are not the only ones. So we’ve created thumbwidth and thumbheight. This allows you to set the thumbnail width and/or thumbnail height. The default thumbnail width is 133 pixels, while default thumbnail height is 100 px.
Once again, here’s the list of function parameters for our Screenshot API
- Domain
- Fullurl
- Process
- Resolution
- Delay
- Thumbwidth
- Thumbheight
Conclusion
This is an intro post to our new Screenshot API post, and we hope to have more for you in the future. Right now we are just excited that our new Screenshot API is published and ready for our users. As we’ve mentioned earlier in the post, due to this launch and in good faith, we are cutting the prices in half during the first month (until February 23rd).
For more information, including pricing, documentation and list of features, check out the page created specifically for Screenshot API by clicking here.
