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As you might have noticed there are a lot of missing screenshots on Zootool lately. To be honest this whole screenshot generation thing is so much harder as it seems. We got all the screenshots from Websnapr before last month. Their monthly price was fair, but their quality and speed was weak. They even used IE7 to render the screenshots. (isn’t it ironic to lock out all IE users with Zootool and to have screenshots generated with this crappy browser?)

I then found http://webthumb.bluga.net. Their service is really, really good, ultra fast and they at least use Firefox 3 on Linux to render the shots. But on the negative side they are very expensive. When we introduced the import feature, about 80,000 bookmarks got imported within 3 days. That was far beyond our expectations. I won’t talk about any numbers here, but believe me that the bill for those screenshots did hurt. I was even forced to take the import down until there’s a better solution. This is really bad, because I thought I I finally found an appropriate service in webthumb to handle that stuff. To introduce a much requested feature and to take it offline a few days later is not exactly the way things should be either.

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. We are finally working on our own solution, which probably is the only way to go. It gives us the chance to build a really great screenshot service, which will keep up with the speed, even when people import 80,000 bookmarks and which is tailored to our needs without costing the world.

I hope for your patience in the meantime and promise that all missing screenshots will be regenerated as soon as possible!!