Creating website thumbnail images in ASP.NET

Following on from my post about generating PDF thumbnails in ASP.NET, here is another one about generating website thumbnail images using DynamicImage.

<sitdap:DynamicImage runat="server" ImageFormat="Jpeg">
    <Layers>
        <sitdap:WebsiteScreenshotLayer WebsiteUrl="http://www.microsoft.com">
            <Filters>
                <sitdap:ResizeFilter Width="500" Mode="UseWidth" />
            </Filters>
        </sitdap:WebsiteScreenshotLayer>
    </Layers>
</sitdap:DynamicImage>

You can also use the fluent interface:

string imageUrl = new DynamicImageBuilder()
    .WithLayer(
        new WebsiteScreenshotLayerBuilder().WebsiteUrl("http://www.microsoft.com")
        .WithFilter(FilterBuilder.Resize.ToWidth(500))
    ).Url;

The preceding code will result in this image:

As you can see, the image is of the whole web page, not just the cropped window you'd normally see. If you want that, you can use the Crop filter:

<sitdap:DynamicImage runat="server" ImageFormat="Jpeg">
    <Layers>
        <sitdap:WebsiteScreenshotLayer WebsiteUrl="http://www.microsoft.com">
            <Filters>
                <sitdap:ResizeFilter Width="500" Mode="UseWidth" />
                <sitdap:CropFilter Width="500" Height="500" />
            </Filters>
        </sitdap:WebsiteScreenshotLayer>
    </Layers>
</sitdap:DynamicImage>

Now you should have:

You can optionally specify a timeout, after which if the screenshot capture process hasn't finished, it will terminate and not produce an image.

<sitdap:WebsiteScreenshotLayer WebsiteUrl="http://www.microsoft.com" Timeout="3000" />

new WebsiteScreenshotLayerBuilder()
    .WebsiteUrl("http://www.microsoft.com")
    .Timeout(3000)

Since these images will take a while to produce, you'll probably want to enable caching in DynamicImage.

Thanks are due to to 'NoLoveLust's work on wrapping CutyCapt.exe, which provided a starting point for this code.

To get it working, you'll need to copy CutyCapt.exe from the Tools folder in the repo to App_Data/DynamicImage.

2 comments

Jorge Silva
Jun 3, 2011
16:09

Hey,

Where can i get this code working?

I tried github and ran the msbuild and then it simply doesnt exist.. :P

Tim Jones
Jun 7, 2011
16:18

@Jorge The easiest way to get it working is to install the NuGet package (it's called DynamicImage.Extensions.ContentAwareResizing).

If that's not an option, then you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: * Open the Visual Studio solution (SoundInTheory.DynamicImage.Extensions.sln). * Build it, which gives you the .NET DLLS * Copy CAIR.exe and pthreadVSE2.dll (from build/NuGet/DynamicImage.Extensions.ContentAwareResizing/content/App_Data/DynamicImage) into your App_Data/DynamicImage folder.

Hope that helps.

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