Build Website Screenshot & Thumbnail Generator: Day 1 - Website Screenshot Tool

Level: Beginner

Projects in this week’s series:

This week, we progressively build a website screenshot and thumbnail generator with Python.

Why build this? Because capturing website screenshots manually is tedious. Whether you’re building a portfolio, documenting web projects, archiving pages, or creating thumbnails for link previews — automated screenshots save hours of work.

What you’ll learn: This series teaches you browser automation, headless browsing, image manipulation, and building tools that interact with the web programmatically. These skills apply to web scraping, testing, and automation.

Here is this week’s series:

• Day 1: Website Screenshot Tool (Today)

• Day 2: Batch Screenshots & Thumbnail Generator

• Day 3: FastHTML Web Interface

View All Projects This Week

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Today’s Project

We’re starting with the foundation: we’re creating a command-line tool that captures full-page screenshots of any website. Just provide a URL, and get a perfect screenshot saved to your computer.

You’ll learn how to automate a real web browser using Playwright, capture screenshots programmatically, and build tools that interact with websites automatically!

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Project Task

Create a website screenshot tool that:

• Takes a URL as input from the user

• Captures a full-page screenshot of the website

• Saves the screenshot as a PNG file

• Uses Playwright for headless browser automation

• Handles different viewport sizes

• Shows progress feedback

• Names files with timestamps for organization

This project gives you hands-on practice with browser automation, headless browsing, screenshot capture, and building web interaction tools — essential skills for testing, scraping, and automation!

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Expected Output

Here is the command line output when we run the program. Here the user typed in “apple.com” and the program launches a browser in the background, loads the website, and captures the screenshot:

The screenshot from the example above was saved in my working directory. Here is the exact screenshot that was generated:

There you have a full website screenshot made entirely in Python.

Setup Instructions

Install Playwright:

pip install playwright

Then execute one of these (whichever works) in the terminal:

playwright install chromium

or/and

playwright install

The second command downloads the Chromium browser that Playwright will use for screenshots.

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Coming Tomorrow

Tomorrow we’ll add batch screenshot capabilities and a thumbnail generator — process multiple URLs at once, create smaller preview images, and export screenshots in different sizes. Your single-URL tool becomes a bulk processing powerhouse!

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Skeleton and Solution

Below you will find both a downloadable skeleton.py file to help you code the project with comment guides and the downloadable solution.py file containing the correct solution.

Get the code skeleton here:

Get the code solution here: