Screenshot API
Website screenshot use cases
Recipes for the jobs a website screenshot API gets hired for: mobile and dark mode captures, single elements, pages behind a login, bot-protected sites, Open Graph images and bursty traffic. One problem per page, with the exact options that solve it, code you can paste, and a note on when it is not the right tool.
Use cases
Pick the problem you are solving
Mobile screenshots at any viewport
Emulate an iPhone, a Pixel, an iPad or any custom viewport and capture the page exactly as those visitors see it.
Screenshots without cookie banners or ads
Ads, trackers and consent popups are blocked before the page renders, and one option dismisses first-party banners.
Screenshot a single element
Crop the capture to one CSS selector, such as a chart or a pricing table, with a transparent background if you need it.
Screenshots under traffic spikes
Absorb bursts of screenshot traffic without a browser pool: no throttling, parallel requests and a cache whose hits are free.
Screenshot blocked websites
When a site blocks headless browsers, any API key escalates the capture through proxy tiers automatically.
Screenshot a site from another country
Pin the request to a country with a two-letter code and capture the prices and copy a local visitor sees.
Screenshots in dark mode
Set prefers-color-scheme before the capture and get the dark or light theme of any page that supports it.
Animated screenshots as video
Record any page as a short MP4 or WebM instead of a still frame, up to 10 seconds at up to 60 fps.
Dynamic Open Graph images
Point og:image at an API URL and every share shows a current, cached screenshot of the page.
Screenshots behind a login
Forward a session cookie or a bearer token as a request header and capture pages only your users can see.
Screenshots of JavaScript-rendered pages
Wait for a selector, a lifecycle event or a delay so single-page apps and lazy sections finish rendering before capture.
Screenshots with a browser frame
Wrap the capture in a light or dark browser window over a color, gradient or image background.
Faster, smaller screenshots
Skip metadata, pick JPEG quality and pixel density, and wait for a selector instead of a timer to cut time and bytes.
Start here
Docs and resources
Ready to capture any website?
Every recipe on this page runs on the same endpoint. Start on the free API key, with every Pro feature included, and pick a paid plan when you need volume.
Other use cases
Explore the other Microlink APIs
PDF invoices from authenticated pages
Print the invoice page your app already renders: forward the session, hide the chrome, name the file.
Clean PDFs without ads or banners
Get a document, not a browser tab: ads and consent popups blocked by default, sticky chrome removed with one CSS rule.
Markdown with metadata frontmatter
Get each page as Markdown with a YAML frontmatter block: title, author, date, word count and reading time.
Clean Markdown, no boilerplate
Convert only the article body: one selector keeps navigation, ads and widgets out of the Markdown.
Custom fields alongside metadata
Get prices, ratings, headings or any CSS selector, typed and returned next to the normalized metadata.
Fix missing or wrong og:image
Override any normalized field with a rule and chain fallbacks so link previews never render empty.
Any website to JSON
Declare the fields you want as CSS selector rules and get typed JSON back, with null for anything the page does not have.
Product prices and stock
Read prices as numbers and stock as text from any product page, with fallback rules that survive template changes.
Scrape Cloudflare-protected websites
Get the real page instead of “Just a moment”: with any API key, blocked requests escalate through proxy tiers up to residential IPs.
Fix 403 and 429 scraping errors
Tell an antibot 403, a throttling 429 and your own quota apart, then route, cache or wait accordingly.
Brand and media monitoring from Google News
Query Google News by brand, country and time window and get headline, publisher and ISO 8601 date for every article.
Price comparison from Google Shopping
Get every merchant Google Shopping lists for a product, with a numeric price, the merchant name and the rating, per country.