Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is there any way to generate thumbnails of web links like Facebook generates when we paste a link in status or comment?

12th November 2013

My answer to Is there any way to generate thumbnails of web links like Facebook generates when we paste a link in status or comment? on Quora

There are a bunch of services that can do this. I’ve successfully used http://url2png.com/ for this in the past.

Posted 12th November 2013 at 12:11 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles? - 13th November 2025
Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican - 9th November 2025
Video + notes on upgrading a Datasette plugin for the latest 1.0 alpha, with help from uv and OpenAI Codex CLI - 6th November 2025

This is Is there any way to generate thumbnails of web links like Facebook generates when we paste a link in status or comment? by Simon Willison, posted on 12th November 2013.

facebook 117 webapps 44 quora 1005

Next: Does the Google Maps API let you remove details of the map such as street names to focus on pins on the map?

Previous: Why can't I do style="padding: 20px" and a border in the same div?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe