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Automatic XML Sitemap Screenshotter

Automatically generate screenshots from URLs found in an XML sitemap using the ScreenshotOne API in Python. Developed by Stach Redeker & ChatGPT, 2023. Released under the MIT license.

As a WordPress specialist, I like to show my work. This means that I often have to take screenshots of websites. Although browser extensions exist that can capture a single, full-page screenshot, little tooling is available for capturing an entire website. The Automatic XML Sitemap Screenshotter aims to change that. The program is open-source and Python-based. Automatic XML Sitemap Screenshotter uses the ScreenshotOne API to capture images of an entire website, based on an XML sitemap input.

I opted for an implementation using the ScreenshotOne API because making full-page screenshots is not trivial. Nowadays, sites have sticky headers, cookie banners, and other annoying pop-ups, making capturing a proper full-page image very difficult. The ScreenshotOneAPI has inbuilt tooling to combat all these issues. Why bother reinventing the wheel, right?

Features

The program...

  • automatically extracts URLs from a provided XML sitemap;
  • generates full-page screenshots with a width of 1920 pixels using the ScreenshotOne API;
  • gets rid of cookie banners, floating elements, etc.;
  • allows the user to set a folder where the screenshots are saved.

Results Figure 1: the result after running the program: a folder with every page of a website screenshotted.

Minimal (system) requirements

  • The program is built and tested for Windows operating systems using Python 3.9. It is also tested on Python 3.8.
  • The working on other technology stacks cannot be guaranteed.

Python dependencies

  • os
  • requests
  • shutil
  • bs4 (Beautiful Soup 4)
  • lxml
  • screenshotone

Installation, setup and usage

Quick installation guide

  1. Installing Dependencies

    pip install requests beautifulsoup4 screenshotone lxml

  2. Creating API Credentials

    • Sign up for a ScreenshotOne account and obtain your API access_key and secret_key. The free plan allows for 100 screenshots each month.
    • Input the API credentials when prompted by the application during runtime.

  3. Running the script

    python Screenshotter.py

Beginner-friendly installation guide

  1. Download Python 3.9 at the Python website.
  2. Download the latest release of XML-screenshotter at Releases.
  3. Sign up for a ScreenshotOne account and obtain your API access_key and secret_key. The free plan allows for 100 screenshots each month.
  4. Press the Windows key and the R key simultaneously. A 'run' dialog will show up.
  5. Type cmd and press enter.
  6. Type cd and then the folder path of the folder where Screenshotter.py is located. Example: cd C:\Users\stach\OneDrive\Bureaublad\screenshotter. Press enter.
  7. Type pip install requests beautifulsoup4 screenshotone lxml and press enter.
  8. Type python Screenshotter.py. Press enter.
  9. Follow the instructions in the terminal to create screenshots.

Program Figure 2: the program in action.

Limitations

  • Nested sitemaps (sitemaps linking to other sitemaps), such as the default /sitemap.xml on WordPress installs, are not supported. For WordPress, use the individual sitemaps instead, such as /wp-sitemap-posts-page-1.xml.
  • The free plan at ScreenshotOne allows for 100 screenshots each month.
  • There is little error-checking built in. If the program stops, it is most likely because something went wrong with the API (e.g. you entered the wrong credentials, or the connection timed out).

License

This project is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Acknowledgements

ScreenshotOne's Python SDK documentation was very helpful to integrate the ScreenshotOne API. I used the Beautiful Soup Documentation to learn more about extracting URLs from an XML page. ChatGPT helped me to write boilerplate code. I also used ChatGPT for troubleshooting.