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Website screenshots from Python in 20 lines

Use requests to capture a page, handle errors properly, and save the result - plus a batch version for a list of URLs.

Thien Nguyen

Creator & Maker

· May 27, 2026· 2 min read

Python is a natural fit for scraping, reporting and data pipelines, and screenshots often end up in all three. Here is the smallest useful client.

The basics

import os
import requests

API = "https://api.snapopa.com/capture"
HEADERS = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SNAPOPA_API_KEY']}"}


def capture(url: str, **options) -> dict:
    res = requests.post(API, headers=HEADERS, json={"url": url, **options}, timeout=90)
    body = res.json()
    if not res.ok or not body.get("success"):
        raise RuntimeError(body.get("error") or f"HTTP {res.status_code}")
    return body["data"]


shot = capture("https://example.com", format="png", isFullPage=True)
print(shot["fileUrl"])

Options map one-to-one to the JSON body, so anything in the API reference works as a keyword argument.

Saving the image

img = requests.get(shot["fileUrl"], timeout=30)
with open("example.png", "wb") as f:
    f.write(img.content)

Capturing a list of URLs

For a handful of pages a thread pool is plenty:

from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor

urls = ["https://example.com", "https://example.org", "https://example.net"]

with ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=4) as pool:
    for url, data in zip(urls, pool.map(lambda u: capture(u, format="webp"), urls)):
        print(url, "->", data["fileUrl"])

Keep max_workers within your plan's rate limit. For hundreds or thousands of URLs, the dashboard's Bulk tool or async captures are a better fit.

Tips

Set a generous client timeout. Heavy pages with isFullPage can take several seconds.
Use responseCache when re-running the same script during development so you are not billed for every iteration.

The basics

Saving the image

Capturing a list of URLs

Tips

Reading about screenshots? Try the API.