How to Take a Website Screenshot with Python

If you are building monitoring dashboards, link previews, or visual QA tooling in Python, a screenshot API is a practical way to avoid browser automation overhead. This post walks through the common capture patterns Dev.to readers usually care about: basic screenshots, full-page capture, JSON output, mobile emulation, geolocation, and batch jobs. Prerequisites Python 3.7+ The requests library (pip install requests) A Site-Shot API key (sign up here) Basic Screenshot Capture The simplest approach — send a GET request to the API and save the image: import requests response = requests.get("https://api.site-shot.com/", params={ "url": "https://example.com", "userkey": "YOUR_API_KEY", "width": 1280, "height": 1024, "format": "png", }, timeout=70) with open("screenshot.png", "wb") as f: f.write(response.content) That's it. The API renders the page in a real Chromium browser and returns the screenshot image directly. Full Page Screenshot To capture the entire scrollable page, not just the vie