It doesn’t come up every day, but I often have to take a screenshot of a web page. (That is, I have to create an image that reproduces what I’m seeing when I load the page into my browser. It’s like taking a picture of my monitor.)
Problem: lots of web pages are big enough that my browser can’t display the entire page at once. And the screenshot capabilities that come standard with Windows and Mac OS X only capture whatever’s visible in a window at any given moment. So if I want to get a screenshot of the full web page, I have to take a screenshot, scroll down, take another screenshot, scroll down… and then use Photoshop to cut and paste and stitch it all together manually.
As you can appreciate, this is a time-consuming pain.
Today, Derek Miller pointed me to a handy little tool called Paparazzi!. It’s free, it’s simple and — sorry, Wintel fans — it’s Mac-only (click the thumbnail for the full-sized version):
Here’s the owner’s manual: Give Paparazzi a web address, and it spits out an image of the entire web page in the format of your choice. You’re done.
Very, very nice. If you ever have to do this kind of stuff, and you’re on a Mac, go download it.
If, on the other hand, you are on a Wintel platform and browse with Opera or Firefox, you can easily zoom out on a web page to make it fit. Even easier. Opera zooms the entire page, while Firefox only changes the font size on the text.
Handy hint for the Wintel crowd, James. The one potential downside that springs to mind is resolution. Do Opera and Firefox do some jiggery-pokery so you then get a full-sized screen capture, or (here’s my suspicion) are the pixel dimensions reduced along with the browser contents?
If there any alternative to simply reducing the pixel dimensions? All Opera does is reduce the size of the images and font size of the items on each page. Then you resize your browser to accommodate it. Does Paparazzi do anything essentially different?
Yep. It actually assembles a full-size graphic – so that a shot of my home page, for example, is over 7,000 pixels high.
I think you’re right about the fruit. :) I can definitely see the usefulness of zooming out to see an entire web page (especially if you don’t have to haul out another app). And good news – the zooming function works on Mac versions of both Firefox and Opera.
For graphic and web design purposes, resolution is often vital. Zooming out in Opera (which works in the Mac version as well) can result in unreadably small text — and since there’s a ceiling on how far Opera will zoom, longer pages still won’t fit in a single screenshot. Meanwhile, because Firefox scales text and only text, elements with widths specified in pixels or percentages (often tables, graphics or CSS-styled containers) won’t shrink along with them. For a lot of pages, that also means your screenshot will have to cover multiple screens.
I guess we’re talking apples and oranges. The Opera browser zooms web pages, which still work as functional web pages. Then you can take a screen shot with paint shop pro, if you want. But it might be interesting to see a Wintel version of Paparrazi, and see if it actually does anything supplementary.
Anyone know of a windows app does something similar to paparazzi?
For Windows, try iPageSaver by Spidersoft. (www.spidersoft.com) It can save full-length screenshots of webpages as jpg’s or png’s. It also lets you create or import lists of webpage links (URLs) to be automatically browsed and saved for you in a single batch process.
Odd that there is one, great, FREE option for the Mac and about 20, OK, but $20+ options for the PC. ;o)
Great! so this is how screenspire.com works ;)
just what I was looking for
Hypersnap for the PC works great!
Paparazzi for the Mac OS X platform is nice, but it doesn’t seem to capture Flash content. A major drawback.
It’s a drawback all right, but whether it’s major will depend on the user.
With most of the sites I use this for (online communities, advocacy, news and politics), Flash is almost always a minor component at most. (And with many of the sites I visit, leaving Flash off would be a blessing.)
On the other hand, if you need to capture a Flash-intensive site, then you’ll definitely need to find another tool. Preview under OS X 10.4 has a Grab function that captures a screenload of Flash quite nicely (even to a QuickTime file if you need it). That’s still not a big help with multi-screen Flash sites, but with those sites, it’s often less of an issue.