Quickstart

Create an account and verify your email

Sign up and confirm your email address. Requests made with keys from an account without a verified email return 403 Email verification required.

Generate an API key

Open Dashboard → API keys, choose a workspace, and click Generate New Key. The plaintext key is shown once, so copy it into your secret manager or an environment variable.

Send a capture request

Pass the key in x-api-key (or as Authorization: Bearer <key>) and POST a JSON body to https://screenshotly.app/api/screenshot.

Capture a page

curl --fail-with-body https://screenshotly.app/api/screenshot \
  -X POST \
  -H "x-api-key: $SCREENSHOTLY_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"png"}' \
  --output screenshot.png

// Node.js 18+ (built-in fetch)
import { writeFile } from 'node:fs/promises';

const response = await fetch('https://screenshotly.app/api/screenshot', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'x-api-key': process.env.SCREENSHOTLY_API_KEY,
    'content-type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: 'https://example.com', format: 'png' }),
});

if (!response.ok) {
  throw new Error(`Capture failed: ${response.status} ${await response.text()}`);
}

await writeFile('screenshot.png', Buffer.from(await response.arrayBuffer()));

import os

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://screenshotly.app/api/screenshot",
    headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["SCREENSHOTLY_API_KEY"]},
    json={"url": "https://example.com", "format": "png"},
    timeout=60,
)
response.raise_for_status()

with open("screenshot.png", "wb") as file:
    file.write(response.content)

A successful request returns the image bytes with Content-Type: image/png. Only successful captures consume your allowance. Failed validation, rendering, and delivery attempts remain visible in analytics but do not reduce it.

Free accounts include 100 successful captures in total, with PNG, JPEG, and WebP output. PDF output and async jobs start on the Basic plan. See Authentication for every plan’s limits.

Queue a durable job

For work that must survive request timeouts, use a durable job (Basic plan and above):

curl --fail-with-body https://screenshotly.app/api/jobs \
  -X POST \
  -H "x-api-key: $SCREENSHOTLY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: invoice-4821" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"pdf"}'

The 202 response contains the job id and a statusUrl. Poll GET https://screenshotly.app/api/jobs/{id} until the status is SUCCEEDED, then download the file from its short-lived resultUrl. See Async and batch jobs.

Next steps

Read the full field list in Synchronous capture.
Follow the Capturing screenshots guide for devices, formats, waits, and element removal.
The machine-readable OpenAPI 3.1 specification is at https://screenshotly.app/api/openapi.json.
Official typed clients are maintained publicly in screenshotly-js and screenshotly-python.

Getting Started

API Reference

Guides

Capture a page

Queue a durable job

Next steps