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I'm back!
So my chrome test went well, even ended up making an edge version and rolling with it because when I close the program with keystrokes Edge doesn't come back all whiney about how I shut down the browser last time.

So this is going great, working exactly as I expected. The only issue. Other people log into this computer to perform various tasks as well.

So what I am looking for is a software that will take a full screen screen shot of a url I specify every 30 minutes or so and save that file on a network drive. If it has a delay that would be best because some of the sites take about 3 seconds to load data before a screen shot would be useful.

Hopefully something that can run whether the user is logged in or not, but does so in the background so as not to disturb other users who are using the computer.

EDIT I am doing this on Windows.

Jaymes
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  • Jaymes... Look over https://superuser.com/questions/75614/take-a-screen-shot-from-command-line-in-windows and see if a solution there would suffice. Having a 3-5 second pause is just a trivial matter using PowerShell and [`start-sleep -seconds 5`](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/start-sleep?view=powershell-7.2) so you'd basically put something like that on the line above the logic of the tool to take the screen shot of the window, screen, etc. All just trivial matters playing with those tools and the commands for the tools and testing. – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style Feb 15 '22 at 18:33
  • You can also use VCL or a similar tool to stream the screen to a file... just slow down the frame rate to 0.3 or 0.2 fps (or as low as it can go... not sure if <1 fps works). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18187948/change-frames-per-second-for-vlc-stream – DrMoishe Pippik Feb 15 '22 at 18:57
  • Thanks @VomitIT-ChunkyMessStyle! That was an enlightening thread, but it did not have the information I am looking for. I use the sleep setting in my scripts but I am trying to prevent having to use the scripts. It has to open the browser window and bring it active in order for me to screen cap it. The opening of the page and going full screen is disruptive to other users of the machine. I found a program called SiteShoter which KIND OF does what I am asking, except it doesn't have the time delay feature so my screenshots are blank. – Jaymes Feb 15 '22 at 19:25
  • I'm going to continue to use the scripts until I am ultimately told not to, but I was hoping to find some kind of program that would accomplish the task at hand. – Jaymes Feb 15 '22 at 19:25
  • @Jaymes In this case, I wonder if saving the URL site to HTML to be opened up as what the URL contained at that moment would suffice. Rather even needing to save a screen shot, you could potentially and silently call a URL and dump the out to HTML using [`Invoke-WebRequest`](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/invoke-webrequest?view=powershell-7.2) or something similar. You could then open HTML with any browser and scrape or see what's needed or save a screen shot on a server, etc. instead. What's the ultimate content goal/viewability requirements? – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style Feb 15 '22 at 19:54
  • The delay thing is likely the web browser rendering the page. That should be a non-issue if you can make the URL call and save the HTML content to a file. That file can then be named, moved, etc. for user to launch or even to parse out data via HTML to further automate, etc. Help me understand what you're really trying to accomplish and I'll see if I have anything useful for you . – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style Feb 15 '22 at 19:59
  • @VomitIT-ChunkyMessStyle We use digital touch screens with software that displays documents and webpages at intervals. We have some internal maps that are resource intensive and take a moment to load. This makes the touchscreens look slow or laggy. To combat this I am capturing a screenshot of the page every 30 minutes and uploading it to a shared drive. This is working great, perfectly. But other people have to log in to use the server and that kicks the user off so no more screenshots. Or someone logs on as the user and is actively using the machine when it tries to take the screenshot – Jaymes Feb 16 '22 at 13:21

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We ended up writing an app that would do exactly this for us. I will try to convince him to make it more public friendly and release it.

Jaymes
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