Capturing a screenshot of a full webpage

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This is a followup to my article on Kosmix where I include a screenshot of the full webpage results from my search for “angular momentum”.

Screen captures, as the name implies, are essentially images of the visible area of a screen or part of a screen. Think of them as photos of what the user sees on the screen.

First off, I knew I could create the image I wanted with enough regular screen shots, but I thought there must be software out there to do what I wanted to do–that is take a screenshot of a webpage that was larger than the window I was using to view it.

I started off looking at software like:

• Grab/Built-in Tools: MacOS X comes with a way to take a number of different screen captures from the whole screen, just a window or an area selected by the user. However, these built-in tools are limited to what’s visible on the screen. It’s free with MacOS X.
• Layers: Layers has an interesting value proposition for screen captures. As it’s name implies it will save a screen capture that is separated into individual layers, one for each visible object on the screen, as a Photoshop file. It’s an interesting way to speed up the process of taking multiple images on a screen. It costs $19.95 though there is a trial download available.
• Print as PDF: What if I “printed” the webpage as a PDF file. Once again MacOS X comes with a built-in way of saving/printing anything as a PDF file. The downside, it doesn’t always fully render nor faithfully reproduce a webpage. It’s free with MacOS X.
• Snapz Pro: Snapz Pro by Ambrosia Software, is the “gold” standard of screen capture utilities for the Mac. It lets the user “effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime® movie or screenshot”. If you need to create a walk-through or short demo, Snapz Pro is great. If you need to create a lot of screen captures in a repeatable way, Snapz Pro is great. Oh, it also costs $69.

All of the solutions that take a screen capture of what’s visible on the screen didn’t quite meet my needs. After a bit more searching around I found something that did…

• screengrab: Screengrab is a Firefox add-on that lets the user save an entire webpage as an image, even if the webpage scrolls beyond the bounds of the current window size. The add-on description even says it’ll capture embedded flash or java on a webpage, though I haven’t tried. Best of all, it’s free!

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