Website thumbnails are essential for blogs, directories and websites to provide more visual experience to the visitors and also it helps to increase the web traffic. Sometimes you need the screenshot or thumb of a site to share it in your social networking site or in your twitter share. The thumbshot or the screenshot is a better idea to give first hand knowledge about a site. You can see the following thumbshots of the sites and analyze what it offers to you. From the thumbshots you can easily identify the site and can also easily find the sites, which have a nice looking or easily accessible or clear interface. You can also eliminate once that you are familiar with by checking the thumbnails. Another interesting thing is that, once we noticed the thumbnail of a website, we will easily identify the site when we are browsing the internet. At that time we can identify the site easily and can effectively make use of the site. Here we are going to present a list of sites which will provide screenshot, thumbshots and microshots of the webpage that you provided to it. Most of the sites have a readymade script available, which you can implement on your site,blog or directory to display the thumbnail of a website.
Thumbalizr
Thumbalizr helps you to take screenshot of the screen or the page you want. It is pretty easy to generate screenshot with this tool.
Shrinktheweb
Shrinktheweb is also a good service to show thumbshot of webpages to your site or blog. I have noticed several times in several popular blogs are using this service. They have several plans to offer the thumbshots to sites or blogs.
Websnapr
websnapr lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page. Allow your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking. Increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness. The site delivered more than 4 billion snaps till now. One can capture small(202×152) or Micro (90×70) sizes shots.
Websots Pro
WebShotsPro.com is a service for webmasters to include advanced website screenshot technology on their websites.They have been generating screenshots for over two years and have crafted a robust and scalable screenshot generation info structure.
Thumbnails Pro
ThumbnailsPro (TNP) is a one step process to generate and display website thumbnails to your web visitors. TNP puts you in conrol of the quality, size, dimensions and other elements of your thumbnail images easily.
Thumboo
Now you can display high-quality website thumbnails on your site with our easy to drop-in php or java code. Just enter the URL of the page you want to generate, choose a size and copy & paste the code.
Browsershots
web developers wet dream when it comes to testing out a new site in multiple browsers.
Bulga.net Webthumb
(http://webthumb.bluga.net/home )
Bluga.net WebThumb provides a white-label web service API for generating web thumbnails and full size snapshots of websites.
w3snapshot
Website snapshots are taking the web by storm because today’s Web users demand more visual information. Web screenshots enhance your website by giving your users the ability to preview links instantly. Many of today’s most influential, leading-edge companies are enjoying our fully automated website snapshot service.Get your free website snapshot preview image and screenshots for directories and blogs. Including website snapshots in your application/website will dramatically improve user experience. It will allow your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking. Increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness. The service is easy to use, fast and reliable.
Sitethumbshot
(http://www.sitethumbshot.com/ )
SiteThumbshot provides webmasters, developers and users with simple online access to capture screen or website thumbnail of almost any web page. These webpage thumbnails or site snapshots can be used in any kind of application that requires the display of site thumbnails or have webpage preview. These applications include web sites, windows/linux/mac applications, iPhone/mobile utilities, browser plugins, etc.
Thumbshots
(http://www.thumbshots.ru/en/ )
Thumbshots are screenshots of online documents such as web page in small thumbnail sizes. Thumbshots help users to visualize web sites or preview links before clicking. Thumbshots have been used in numerous different applications, ranging from Windows Explorer and a desktop search engine like Copernic to Internet search engines and web directories which provide a thumbshot preview of a webpage alongside search results.
Webprev
Webprev.com is a free online service that offers to get website previewed images instantly. Users are able to capturing screenshots of websites and webmasters can also add webpage thumbnails to their own sites to help their visitors to preview links.
Megasnaps
Allow your visitors to see an image thumbnail of any website before clicking its link. Increase your site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness offering a great experience to your visitors.Get free website image thumbnails for all your links a use them in your blog, directories or any other application that you like to do. Using website image preview in your site or application will dramatically improve your user’s experience.
Mozshot
Technical demo to take screenshot of any URL, powered by Mozilla and Ruby
Webscreenshots
(http://www.web-screenshots.com/)
Web-screenshots.com provides you an easy and quick way to grab web page screenshots like Digg or stumbleupon, in a professional way. Picture size from 64×32 up to 1600×1200 pixels
Any page can be screenshoted, not just the first page of the site,No watermarks from their servers.
WebsitesScreenshot
(http://www.websitesscreenshot.com/)
The Websites Screenshot DLL is a .NET Class Library to render website page. It allows you to capture website page and create full size screenshot or thumbnail preview in a number of different formats like JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIF. You can use this dll for the following web or windows programming task.
Similar services
Picshot – http://www.picoshot.com/
Webshot- http://www.webshot.in/
Mythumbshot – http://www.mythumbshot.com/webroot/
Pagepeeker – http://pagepeeker.com/
Page Glimpse – http://www.pageglimpse.com/ (New version coming soon)
Bonus
Here is a simple way to get the thumbshot of webpage easily. Just copy (or click) the following url to the address bar and then press the enter button or click the go button. You will be presented with a small thumbshot of the webpage that you mentioned in the url.
http://img.bitpixels.com/getthumbnail?code=00000&url=http://www.coolefriend.com
Here we makeuseof the Bitpixel to obtain the thumbshot. After registering the Bitpixel for an account, you will get a code, which you can use to track the statistics the thumbshots that you used. You can use your Google account to register in Bitpixel.
What you think about such screenshot or thumbshot generating services? Is it a useful way to generate thumbshot of a webpage? Can you suggest some other apps or tools to do the same? Do you have any idea to generate thumbnails using scripts like PHP, JavaScript,etc.?
Another useful service is “Screenshot machine” at http://www.screenshotmachine.com – fast and reliable service with simple API