A screenshot API turns a URL or a block of HTML into an image or a PDF. This section shows what teams build with that one capability. Each use-case page maps the job to a concrete preset or set of parameters, and shows one rendered example.
Use cases by group
- Social cards and link previews. Render an HTML template as a 1200×630 image with the
og_cardpreset. Our post on generating social cards with screenshots walks through it, and marketing images from HTML templates covers ad and banner sizes. - Thumbnails and content. Small previews of websites for directories, link lists and documentation.
- PDF generation. Invoices, reports and certificates from HTML, with the
pdf_documentpreset and the PDF parameters. - Monitoring and archiving. Scheduled captures of the same pages to record how they change. The batch endpoint captures many URLs in one request.
- Visual QA. Captures after each deploy to compare against a baseline.
- AI agents. Screenshots that give a model a view of a page. Read screenshot vs DOM vs accessibility tree to decide which input your agent needs.
How to choose
Start from the output you need. If it is an image for people to see, pick an image use case and its preset. If it is a document to keep or print, pick a PDF use case. If you need the same capture again and again, pick a monitoring use case and add caching or webhooks.
Each page has a request you can copy. Get a free API key to run it. No credit card is needed.