In this article we will take a look into mass screenshots.
In general, you need a screenshot if you want to show to other user how something looks like on the screen of your device. It takes only few seconds to make and share a screenshot so why would you need and API or other automated services for it?
Here are few several reasons when these services are needed.
1) Huge list of the websites
Developing a product such as website catalog or advertising monitoring system, or reviews service has tasks with parsing the websites data and capturing how do they look like. Doing this task manually is very time consuming but updating this data base is even worse.
Of course, you can hire a freelancer who will write a script. But afterwards you still has to maintain it, deal with captchas and complains from you hosting provider if you will have a stable load.
There is a high probability that you’ll end up with renting a dedicated server, bunch or proxies and a freelance that will make an update once or twice a month.
Or you can use a Screenshots API provider.
2) Development unit testing
Sometimes during development testing you need to check a lot of pages not only a desktop version of the website but a tablet and mobile also.
You either could click all these pages by yourself, or make a screenshots for all of them.
That is why our API supports customs headers and device emulation which you can specify in the parameters to the request.
The page html could be returned with the screens shot as well to ease your debugging process.