Screenshot API with curl

Take a screenshot of any web page from the command line. One request, binary image back, no SDK and no JSON envelope to unwrap.

Quickstart

This snippet was executed against a live server before being published here.

# Save a PNG of a page, 1280px wide.
# Ad slots and cookie banners are removed before the capture.
curl -o screenshot.png \
  "https://api.screenshotline.com/take?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com\
&access_key=YOUR_KEY\
&viewport_width=1280\
&block_ads=true\
&block_cookie_banners=true"

# The URL works directly in an <img src>, so this is also valid:
#   <img src="https://api.screenshotline.com/take?url=...&access_key=...">
# For anything browser-visible, use a signed URL instead - see below.

Need a key? Create a free account — 100 renders a month, no card, no confirmation email.

Options

Parameter	Default	What it does
url	required	The page to capture. http/https only; private and reserved addresses are refused.
format	png	png, jpeg, webp or pdf.
full_page	false	Capture the whole scrollable page, scrolling first so lazy images load.
viewport_width	1280	Viewport width in pixels.
viewport_height	800	Viewport height in pixels.
selector	—	Capture only the element matching this CSS selector.
block_ads	false	Block ad networks and collapse the empty slot they leave behind.
block_cookie_banners	false	Remove consent banners, including ones injected after load.
color_scheme	light	Render the page as light or dark.
delay	0	Extra wait before capture, in ms.
cache	false	Serve a cached image when one exists. Cache hits are never billed.
fail_on_blank	false	Return 502 instead of an image when the capture looks blank.

Errors

Failures return JSON with a stable code. Successful captures return the image bytes directly, with no envelope.

{
  "error": {
    "code": "invalid_access_key",
    "message": "Unknown or revoked API key."
  }
}

Common codes: missing_access_key (401), invalid_access_key (403), quota_exceeded (402), render_timeout (504), blank_capture (502).

Failed renders are not billed, and neither are cache hits. We detect a blank capture rather than assuming a 200 means success, so a bot wall that returns an empty page does not come out of your quota.

Signed URLs

The headline use case is putting a capture straight into an <img src>. A raw key in public HTML is a billing incident waiting to happen, so sign the URL instead: the signature covers every parameter, and a tampered URL is refused.

node tools/sign.js "https://example.com" full_page=true

Set REQUIRE_SIGNATURE=true to refuse unsigned requests entirely.

Quota headers

Every response carries your position, so you never need a second request to check:

X-Quota-Limit: 2000
X-Quota-Used: 417
X-Quota-Remaining: 1583
X-Quota-Period: 2026-09