One Million Screenshots
28 comments
·August 10, 2025karpour
esseph
There was some F1 website posted on here the other day and it was absolutely beautiful, but a bit quirky to use in practice.
Ton of people complained, they hated it!
That's why everything is fucking boring, because everybody tries to cater to the average.
bookofjoe
I tried really hard to like that F1 website but just couldn't do it: terrible experience.
dathery
This is a neat visualization. It makes me want to build something like this with actual screenshots (scraping from places like old forums, image hosting sites, etc.) rather than web page renderings.
One of my most prized possessions is my collection of personal screenshots -- I've managed to save basically every screenshot I've taken over the past ~20 years. It's very nostalgic to put them on shuffle and see how my desktop has changed over time, remember what random thing I was working on, etc.
Could be cool to extend the concept beyond one user.
stavros
Please publish those screenshots somewhere, guys. They're a part of history, and we don't have enough of them.
mockingloris
I screenshot all new sites I visit. A UI interaction catches my attention, I screenshot. My files system is 60% images. It's an habit.
As a self-taught software dev; it helped me hone good design skills and also off topic - I poke around a lot when I visit certain websites to see which technologies they are built with. Maybe it was me testing js scripts or verifying the API/Object properties of certain functions - the habit stuck haha.
Dey well
Fade_Dance
Very cool. Would be interesting for a more niche filter criteria, since you aren't exactly finding many hidden gems in the top million mostly corporate sites. Maybe AI could provide that filter (top 1 million "niche" sites, or smaller sites that have been around since the late 90s).
starchild3001
Glad to see "dead internet theory" not holding up!
PS: As someone who worked on internet search, I can assure you that at least half of most popular web pages change in about 6 months time. And the change is in no way something that can be done by bots.
bookofjoe
Mine is far from popular and hasn't changed at all in 21 years.
blendaddict
Wow, I‘m impressed. This is a really cool tool to get some inspiration as web dev. Although I have to say it‘s a bit scary how similar all the websites look nowadays…
hn-user-42
zoomed out image looks interesting
dylan604
Something is weird with some of the gray areas where it'll say "this screenshot appears broken", but I thought it was just my machine. Your image looks very similar in the the broken in the same pattern. So I guess it wasn't just my connection and caching issues.
LorenDB
Cloudflare Family DNS seems to be blocking this site.
Unearned5161
I like the ones that are greyed out because they have some infernal popup about to appear
wewewedxfgdf
Why is this so fast
Zealotux
It's pretty clever optimization, it actually only shows a few dozens images at all times and only update the groups as you zoom in, for example https://tiles.onemillionscreenshots.com/2024-05-01/tiles/-1/...
You don't even need something fancy like WebGPU/WebGL, just the CSS transition property will do the job there.
pan69
I assume that they are using some form of mipmapping, a technique by which you have several images at different sizes to represent different levels of detail. It is used a lot in 3D environments.
mariocesar
Clicking on the website to view the details appears to be broken
esseph
Might have been a temporary glitch?
Just tried and it's working here in the US.
latchkey
I asked them to add my site and got spammed with some service they offer.
null
This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.
Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.