Web Page Thumbnails with Python and Mozilla

News Feed

I been wanting to have an automated way of creating thumbnails of web pages. I did some extensive searching around the web for a solution, and the easiest solution seamed to be to use Python to create a very cut down GTK web browser powered by a embedded version of Mozilla. Its actually simpler than it sounds.

The problem with all the examples I found were they were either broken due to age or lacked the features I wanted. I wanted

  • The page size to be configurable.
  • The thumbnail size to be configurable.
  • Shut down after a certain time if it ends up hanging.
  • Able to run from the command line.

I was not interested in doing a whole web page, so I did not make it scroll down and do everything, though I am sure that would be possible if you wanted to.

So with out further ado here is my script. I have only tested it on Linux, but I guess it could work on Windows if Python and GTK along with the gtkMozEmbed was installed.