Frequently asked questions
Have a different question and can’t find the answer you’re looking for? You are most welcome to send us an email we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
- What is this?
- It's a collection of 1,048,576 homepage screenshots that you can zoom all the way into. It's a weired and wonderful way to explore the web. It's also a free API for embedding website screenshots in your own projects.
- Why does it exist?
- We wanted to celebrate Urlbox taking over 100 million screenshots for customers in 2023... so we thought it would be fun to take an extra 1,048,576 screenshots evey month... did we mention we're really into screenshots.
- How was it made?
- This site was made with Next.js and Leaflet.js and deployed to Cloudflare. The screenshots were taken with Urlbox. Post processing was done with Ruby and Vips running on Hatchbox.
- When was it made?
- We started taking screenshotsfor this on the 1st January 2024. We've since taken more screenshots on the first of every month. The interface and post-processing has evolved over time as a side project.
- How do you choose the sites that you screenshot?
- We currently use the top websites by page rank in the Common Crawl Web Graph. The highest ranking websites are in the centre layers and the lowest at the edge layers. Due to an off by one error you'll find something different at point 0,0.
- How do similar homepages work?
- We created various vector embeddings for every screenshot to help with anomaly and sensitive content detection. Some use the images themselves, others use metadata and content from the URLs. We also use these embeddings to broadly place similar sites in similar areas (left/right/top/bottom) of each layer of Screenshot Of. This AI isn't (yet) consistently making the kinds of associations you might but it can be a fun way to explore.
- When are screenshots updated?
- On the first of every month. It might take a few days for post-processing to happen and the screenshots to be shown on the map.
- Why isn't my homepage available via the API?
- We currently only provide the top websites via the free API. Yours might be added in future months. You can use Urlbox to render any URL you like and submit suggestions here.
- Can I add my website?
- Not yet. But we might expand in future months - check back each month and you might find it. You can also submit a suggestion here. In the meantime we recommend using screenshot.new to grab yours.
- Can I use the screenshots in my project?
- Yes. You can download the screenshots from the map. You can also use the API to get the screenshots. All we ask is that you link back to Screenshot Of in your project.
- Who made this?
- Jonathan Markwell (@jot), Lukas Wiesehan (@lukaswiesehan) and Chris Roebuck (@cjroebuck) made this.
- Where in the world was this made?
- In Sussex, UK, Lower Saxony, Germany and Yorkshire, UK.