How can a web server make such images?

Question

Below is an image of a thumbnail type that is posted on a message from http://doctype.com/. If you have not been to a site yet, it is similar to this site, but for CSS and design, as well as when you post a question, you can make it publish a screenshot and a website URL.

Below is one of them that I saw, do you think this is done programmatically?

If so, how would you do this side of the server?

_{(source: doctype.com )}

Answer 1

You can achieve the “screenshot-in-note” effect by receiving a template image with a curled note (curled frame, paper clip, shadow) and a mask where the website screenshot should be inside the template. As soon as you get a screenshot, you simply rotate it slightly and compose it using the template.

To compile it programmatically, you can use ImageMagick as a chained cpharmston .

Here's an alternative to compiling two images with PIL and python .

Answer 2

If this is done programmatically, it probably uses an image processing library. GD and ImageMagick are two of the more popular.

Answer 3

Yes, you need to do this programmatically on the server. There are several flash plugins for this, but I think the server side is the way to go. Here's how I did it: http://www.guangmingsoft.net/htmlsnapshot/html2image.htm http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php