Richard Davey points out two new interesting PHP commands he discovered when looking through the graphics (GD) section of the manual - imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow.

Upon further investigation both of these commands can be used to take screen shots of the desktop of your server, or any applications window (such as a web browser). Both commands are listed as being "Windows only" and also possibly only in CVS, but I found both of them are in the 5.2.3 standard release and compile without error. However at the moment neither appear to actually do anything other than return fully black images

In testing the functionality, though, his only results were black screens and images instead of the expected image results.

Richard Davey points out two new interesting PHP commands he discovered when looking through the graphics (GD) section of the manual - imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow.

Upon further investigation both of these commands can be used to take screen shots of the desktop of your server, or any applications window (such as a web browser). Both commands are listed as being "Windows only" and also possibly only in CVS, but I found both of them are in the 5.2.3 standard release and compile without error. However at the moment neither appear to actually do anything other than return fully black images

In testing the functionality, though, his only results were black screens and images instead of the expected image results.

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.