Get Images from URL

[zeal5050]

Hi all,

 

I'm interested in creating a social bookmarking site similar to delicious, or digg. However I'm struggling with the conceptualization. I would like for the site to generate a screen shot of the website a user has bookmarked without them actually having to upload an image! I'm wondering if this is at all possible without me storing thousand of images on my database.

 

I searched online and I came across a few alternatives. I was primarily interested in this site, Snapcasa. The site allows you to enter a url and the gets the screen shot based on that url. Any way to incorporate this site into my project?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated, or if you can point me to some examples of this that would be great also!

 

Regards, Zeal

[MadTechie]

Your need to change the Apache service to 'Allow service to interact with desktop', and then control a browser (IE, FF, etc) via a COM make it full screen, tell it to go to the URL and then use imagegrabscreen, to grab the screenshot

<?php
header('Content-Type: image/png');
$im = imagegrabscreen();
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>

[zeal5050]

Thanks for the quick reply!

 

Can you elaborate on this please? how to I control the browser? Do i need to create a function to tell the browser to go to URL?

 

Cheers.

 

[MadTechie]

Heres an example

<?php
$browser = new COM("InternetExplorer.Application");
$handle = $browser->HWND;
$browser->Visible = true;
$browser->Navigate("http://www.libgd.org");

/* Still working? */
while ($browser->Busy) {
    com_message_pump(4000);
}
$im = imagegrabwindow($handle, 0);
$browser->Quit();
imagepng($im, "iesnap.png");
imagedestroy($im);
?>

[zeal5050]

hmm I don't think this solution will work for me.

 

I don't think my hosting will allow me to run iexplore. I have come across another solution that uses the SnapCasa API, but I'm having trouble understanding how to implement it in my site. Maybe someone here can shed some light on this.

 

<?php

ini_set("display_errors", "on");
error_reporting(E_ALL);

define("CODE", "1234"); // depend on what is "User Code" when you register with snapcasa.com
define("LOCATION", "http://www.myserver.com/php/images"); // Location to store the thumbnail
define("SIZE", "S"); // size of the thumbnail: T, S, M, L

function generate_site($url) 
{
$name = str_replace(".", "", $url);
$thumb = LOCATION.$name.'.jpg';
$request_for ='http://snapcasa.com/Get.aspx?code='.CODE.'&size='.SIZE.'&url=http://'.$url;
copy($request_for, $thumb);
}

echo "<h3>This is a test of the SnapCasa API<h3>";

generate_site("www.google.com");

?>

 

There must be a simpler way to get user generated thumbnail images! ???

 

 

 

 

[MadTechie]

Your need to updated the control level from the system as user account as well so it only really working if you have full access, if you don't have a full access your need to use another services API