waybackgif

create a gif of chronological screenshots from any website on Wayback Machine

Initial setup

python -m venv .waybackgif
source .waybackgif/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Install Chrome driver to ~/tmp/chromedriver

How to run

python waybackgif.py http://amazon.com --start_year 1999 --end_year 2003

• start_year defaults to 2020
• end_year defaults to current year

Right now, the code is also only storing 1 image per year, but you can remove this filtering if you want! Also it's not checking to prevent you from doing start year after end year. C'mon.

Examples

Annual snapshot of apple.com (1996 - 2023)

Annual snapshot of stripe.com (2009 - 2023)

Tips

Clean up snapshots:

rm snapshot*.png

Reduce file size of gif:

gifsicle -i original.gif -O3 --colors 256 -o optimized.gif