Recently Retrieved

Free Website Thumbnails

Website thumbnails are screenshots of web pages that let you easily recognize and identify a site. Our system will automatically load the requested web page in a browser at 1280x768 resolution and shrink it down to 240x144. Screenshots we retrieve are stored in our database and refreshed every 3 days. When you request a page our system hasn't seen before, usually it takes about 30 seconds for the first shot to cache - but once it's loaded, it's there forever and will stay up to date!

images archived, queued for retrieval.

To use our system, enter the URL below of the page you want to generate a screenshot for and our system will create the HTML code automatically.

Code

Waiting for Image...

Output

Why use Free Website Thumbnails?

Maybe you're a web designer who wants to show off your work, or want to show a screenshot in an e-mail when you're telling someone about a website. Whatever your reasons are, our website thumbnail tool does the work for you. If you ever wanted to show a screenshot of a website, you either had to purchase software that would do it for you or hit your computer's Print Screen button and copy/paste into a graphics program to save the image.

There are also a couple of websites that claim to offer free website thumbnails like ours, but the images aren't updated as often - sometimes several months between updates. You have to pay to get a more recent image. Also, some of these services brand the images with their logo, which kills any professional edge you're trying to maintain. With our system, every image is refreshed every 72 hours and doesn't contain any special branding.

Why is it free?

The website thumbnail generator was developed as a component of a set of management utilities for the Cartooga shopping cart. When we were making our web-based page editor, we wanted to be able to show the customer a preview of the page they were working on so they could see what it looked like when it was fully rendered without having to open a new browser window. We developed our own imaging component from scratch to accomplish this task and decided to share it with the rest of the web. Now people who aren't Cartooga customers can also benefit from having website screenshots.

We hope you find it useful!

How come (insert url here) doesn't seem to fully load?

To minimize the amount of server resources, we limit the load time of the page to 5 seconds - our servers are in a pretty quick datacenter with multiple 2 GB fiber connections running to the building, but since images are queued in order we can't wait all day for pages to load. If your website is running slow, do what you can to speed it up and try to fetch it again in 3 days. We may change this setting in the future as we dedicate additional servers to this project, so we recommend looking at the screenshot our system produces before blindly posting the image code on your site to make sure it looks right.