Here is a little tutorial to help you if you want to add thumbnails on your web site, in order to display web site previews on a listing web page for example.

The first step is to get a list of the web sites needing thumbnails. In WebSwoon you can edit the web sites list to be captured by hand, but you can also import it from a text file. If your web sites data are saved in a database, you just have to export the list of the urls to a text file and import it in WebSwoon. For example make a "SELECT website_url FROM websites" and save the results in mylist.txt. Import this mylist.txt file in Webswoon overwriting the current web sites.

You can also directly copy the SQL results and paste them directly in the "websites_list.txt" file which is in the program installation folder (should be "c:\program files\webswoon" by default). You must have one url on each line.

You can then launch WebSwoon normally and start the captures. All websites thumbnails will be saved in the specified folder in configuration window (should be c:\program files\webswoon\captures by default) and existing thumbnails will be overwritten according to the selected program options.

When all the websites captures are finished, you have to upload them on your web site in order to be able to use them on your web pages. Use any FTP client and upload all thumbnails from the capture folder (should be c:\program files\webswoon\captures by default) to a dedicated folder on your web site ("captures" for example).

Now if you need to display the thumbnail beside a web site description for example, you can use a PHP script like this one. Note that you will need to convert some characters in the original URL in order to get the thumbnail file name saved by WebSwoon.

(...)

// fix bad characters like webswoon
function getfilename($url) {
      $badchars = array('\\', '/', ':', '?', '~', '&', '=', '<', '>', ',', '#', '%2C');
      return(str_replace($badchars, '_', $url));
}

// display web sites with thumbnails
$query = "SELECT website_title, website_desc, website_url FROM websites ORDER BY website_title ASC";
$result = mysql_query($query);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
      $path = getfilename($row['website_url']);
      print ("<img src=\"captures/" . $path . ".jpg\" align=\"left\">");
      print ("<a href=\"" . $row['website_url'] . "\">" . $row['website_title'] . "</a><br>\n" . $row['website_desc'] . "<br clear=\"all\">\n");
}

(...)

Of course this is a minimalist example, but it should help you to start using thumbnails generated by WebSwoon.

Please take the time to read the program documentation to get more information about all WebSwoon capabilities.