Generate a thumbnail for a given link

[Matthew.S]

Hello Perl Monks. I'm looking to write a Perl utility that will accept a link to some web page/resource and will generate a thumbnail for that web page (assuming that the given web page/resource supports it). When saying "thumbnail" I expect to generate something like say WhatsApp generates when You paste a link into it (a picture with some short text title and a link). The desired output from the utility could be an image file and a textual title in a text file that I can later use to my needs. What general approach would You suggest for me to take? Thank You for Your wisdom.

[Corion]

I would look at oembed and LinkEmbedder, which fetch and render link "preview" information.

If you want to do this yourself, look at either the source code of those modules, or look at any HTTP agent for the fetching and some of the HTML parsers.

[Matthew.S]

This works like a charm. Thank You so much!!!

[Fletch]

You're going to need something driving a web browser (to render the page) that you can ask to save off an image. Something like PhantomJS can do this in a headless / automated fashion. Not used it but a CPAN search does show WWW::Mechanize::PhantomJS is available.

[Corion]

WWW::Mechanize::PhantomJS is mostly decommissioned, due to phantomjs not being under development anymore. But you can run Chrome/Chromium headless, so there also is WWW::Mechanize::Chrome, which also is under maintenance.