Print Screen

[coutancineau]

Hi,
is there a way to make a printscreen from a webpage.

We are making a study on birds and need to save radar images every hour. That page is changing every 15 minutes and we cannot just save the page to a file.

What we need is an image from the page to be saved on our computer. I thought making a webpage with a script that would save the screen, but I dont know how to do it.

Thanks for any help

[Twey]

Is this your webpage or someone else's? Can you modify it? What software is the server using? Will anyone other than you need to access this page?

[BLiZZaRD]

Doing that without having to click a button is tough. HOWEVER!

There is a program that does such a thing. You can download it here:

Time captrue software (http://www.etrusoft.com/screenshot-maker-online-help/buynow.htm)

They also have other software and in packages, including AVI-video capturing!

Most of these are shareware, so if you don't want to pay, or are using it only for a limited time, you may get away with it. But if this is long term then buying one of the packages might just be your thing.

View Packages and Prices (http://www.etrusoft.com/buynow.htm)

I found this with a quick Google search, there may be open source/freeware ones also... but don't count on it... finding an automatic screen capture program was already tough! LOL

[simonf]

Hi... you could try a tool called PrintKey2000 (http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page4.html) which is a free download.... it's a great little tool with a lot of features etc.. enjoy ;)

[coutancineau]

I have done a webpage in a frame on my computer which updates itself every 15 minutes. Now I want to save that page every hour, 24/24 for about 14 weeks in spring and in autumn for a scientific bird study.

Of course I dont have a budget for buying any software. This is why I need to get a free script to save this webpage every hour.

Yes, the page is on my own computer and I will be the only one to visit that page. But if I put it on my server anyone could visit the page.

Thanks
Guy

[Twey]

A script that has recently been brought to my attention, html2jpg (http://freshmeat.net/projects/html2jpg/), as part of a script (or, preferably, as a cron job) will do what you want. It requires a UNIX-based operating system running X11, with Mozilla installed.

[coutancineau]

my computer runs on w2000 :(

[Twey]

Hmm. You could try Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/).
Why is it that saving a copy of the page to hard drive won't suffice?

[coutancineau]

Twey, that's all what I need, a copy of the page on my computor every hour. But every hour, the script has to save the page with a different filename.

[Twey]

Is it just this dynamically-generated image you need, or the whole page? And this image, it's always at the same URL?

[coutancineau]

It is the complete page I need because the radar image is complex (see their website at: http://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=cxx&product=N0S&overlay=11111111&loop=no

It is a picture of this that I need to check the changes every hours for 14 weeks twice a year. We will compare these pictures with other datas we work on (quantities of birds seen in region and quantities of bird killed by flying through skyscrappers windows.

[Twey]

Well, insofar as I can tell, this (http://radar.weather.gov/RadarImg/N0S/CXX_N0S_0.gif) is the only variable image on that page. It's simply overlaid onto the basic, featureless schematic underneath; therefore, that's the only image you actually need to save every hour, though I'll check that in an hour's time.
This is workable. It's a shame you're using Windows; if you had bash and a couple of basic utilities, it would be no problem to do this every hour or so. With Windows, I'll probably have to actually write a binary program.

[coutancineau]

Yes, this is the only image that changes. That radar image is refreshed about every 10 minutes.

I could get a script to download that simple image but I will also need the background for the study when looking at every single images to see what region the birds fly. I also need the date and time of the image.

[coutancineau]

Twey,
I have uploaded my page at: http://projetaves.org/radars/r-burlington.html

This page works well only with IE... :(

But I thought that an automatic printscreen script to save the page would be ok, but if you have a better idea I would take it :)