Generate screenshots for links

[Kovah]

Implement a method or web service to generate screenshots for links to display the content of a site as a small preview.

Update as of Apr. 2021:
A "light" version of this feature was implemented by @jeop10. LinkAce saves a thumbnail URL to the database if the websites provides a og:image or twitter:image. I will keep this issue open for a possible full implementation in the future.
Support for thumbnails were released in v1.6.0.

[Kovah]

Could be interesting: https://github.com/KnpLabs/snappy

[jeop10]

Hello first of all, I just discovered LinkAce and I think It's amazing.

Regarding this issue, do you think it will be good (as a first step) just to gather the image that comes from the metatags twitter:image or og:image?

I have been debating on create such modification in my local copy just to see how it works.

Let me know if this is something acceptable for a PR.

Best regards

[Kovah]

That is a great idea! We get all HTML meta while adding the link anyway, so LinkAce can save the og:image or twitter:image url to the database. The url can be used to display the picture in the application.
Woul be happy to accept a PR for that.

[jeop10]

What do you think of this, I am not sure at all about the size of the thumbnail I tried copying the size of others projects but I don't know if you think its too big.

List:

Detail:

Another idea that I have is just to have a setting that allow the user to select on which side they want the image (left or right)

Best regards.

[Kovah]

Awesome!
I would leave it like that for now, looks fine for me. Advanced settings might be added later on.

[jeop10]

Quick update on this:

I completely forgot to check how this look on tablet and mobile width, and there is some adjustment that I need to make to make it work. I cant guarantee that I would have done by today, but I will try to make the pull request tomorrow.

Best Regards.

[iwconfig]

Have you checked out https://www.thum.io/? You get 1000 screenshot hits per month for free and you could provide a way for users to add their own api key.

Here's an example screenshot: https://image.thum.io/get/maxAge/12/width/2000/https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/issues/18

I don't know what the maximum width/height available but it's more than good enough. Full page view is a paid feature though but I don't think it's needed.

Here's the documentation: https://www.thum.io/documentation/api/url.

You could also have a toggle button for showing a preview of the site, albeit somewhat unintuitive.

1. It would save some of those free requests
2. It would prevent sensitive, personal or whatever you don't want to be sent to thum.io, in regards to privacy

This would mitigate issue #301

[cweiske]

I once built a self-hosted tool that provides an API to obtain website screenshots: https://cweiske.de/phancap.htm and https://github.com/cweiske/phancap
It's not usable anymore because of PHP major version changes, but maybe it's a start for someone.