Capturing Web Page Thumbnails
Posted under AdvertisingIf you use a lot of graphics of sites on your website, you may find that you are consuming a lot of disk space and, more importantly bandwidth, when users download the images. One easy way of optimizing your available hosting account resources is the place thumbnails of website screenshots instead of full size images. Using high quality thumbnails you can quite readily create a gallery of website screenshots. Your visitors can then browse the gallery, cliking on any thumbnail that meets their interest and loading a more complete page to get more information. There are a number of methods of creating high quality thumbnails, including a variety of free and paid services both in the form of online, hosted services available via a web service, desktop packages, some of which include FTP capability allowing you to easily upload your thumnail gallery, and more labour intensive methods. The simplest method of creating a thumbnail is to take a screenshot of the website in a browser, by pressing Alth PrtScr on your Windows keyboard.. You can then paste the captured thumbnail into an image editor of your choice, e.g. Microsoft’s Paint or the free Paint .Net program. These image editing programs will let you resize your capture image and crop or remove any undesired items such as Window borders that you may also have captured. You can then save the image to a file format of your choice – the most popular formats for storing images on the web are either JPEG or PNG formats. You can then use an FTP program, e.g. FileZilla, to upload your saved images to your web server. An alternative is to use a program like Web Page Thumbnails from softwarelode. This is a free program allowing you to capture high-quality, resizable thumbnails of web pages. The program is available for use by anyone wishing to create a gallery of web pages or a sitemap containing previews of the pages on a website. The software is very simple, consisting of a browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer) and a set of buttons and options allowing you to capture thumbnails of any pages you visit. A key advantage of the simplicity of the software is that it is intuitive and very easy to use. All you need do is use the integrated web browser to navigate to web pages, wait for the page to load, press the Capture button and save a high-quality thumbnail of the HTML page. If the size of the captured image doesn’t suit the software allows you to resize the image then perform the image capture again. All captured images are saved as JPEGs ready for upload to a website. Web Page Thumnails also includes a tab showing a gallery of the captured images presented in a HTML preview file. The gallery provides various options such as saving thumbnails with different filenames, setting thumbnails as the desktop background and emailing the thumbnails.
To download a free copy of Web Page Thumbnails, please visit SoftwareLode’s Web Page Thumbnailer.

