How To Grab Web Page Screenshots

There are loads of utilities available to help you capture screen shots of whatever is currently on your display but capturing shots of web pages isn't quite so simple. As soon as you notice those vertical or horizontal scroll bars, then you know that most screen capture utilities won't do the job in one go.

I've already covered free utilities like Gadwin PrintScreen, ScreenHunter, for Windows and SnapNDrag for Mac OS X but there are a few more and some of them are aimed specifically at capturing web pages. Not so long ago, you'd have to take multiple shots and try to stitch them together but not any more…

thumbalizer - thumbalizer is an excellent and free web-based, web page capture service. You enter a URL, select whether you want to capture the screen or the full page, hit the thumb it button and it does the rest.

Once it's done it'll preview the captured image and give you links to download it at various resolutions - 320, 640, 800, 1024 or 1280 pixels wide or even custom. It even comes with a Bookmarklet link to make it easy to use. The only downside I can see is that you can only save as JPEG but apart from that it's a seriously useful site.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver - Page Saver is a Firefox extension that lets you capture images of web pages. These images can be saved in PNG or JPEG formats. Options let you control whether images are captured at full size (which is the default) or scaled down to a smaller size. There's a Pro version available with a few extra bits of functionality but the basic version is free.

Paparazzi - Paparazzi is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages. This very simple tool takes screenshots of websites which do not fit on one screen. You specify the desired width, minimal size, a delay if required and the URL. The program displays a preview and you can save the screenshot to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, or PDF. I've used it a couple of times and it seems to work fine.

WebShot - WebShot allows you to take screenshots of web pages and save them as full sized images or thumbnails. Captured images can be whole or part page and can be saved in JPG, GIF, PNG, or BMP formats.

The freeware version comes with a demo of the command line interface, which can be purchased, and used to streamline the screenshot process on whole websites. The server edition of WebShot comes with a DLL that will allow you to embed WebShot technology in your own applications.

WebSnapr - WebSnapr is another web-based screenshot service. However, it only handles certain sizes and can't capture the entire page if it's bigger than can be viewed on screen. Another downside is that it adds a "POWERED BY WEBSNAPPER.COM" line at the bottom of each image. That said, it's a fairly simple-to-use screen shot service that could easily do the job of some stand-alone tools.

PS Apologies for the lack of individual screenshots here but all of these tools take shots of other web sites so there's really not much to show. The one I did include was taken with thumbalizer and downloaded at a custom width of 200 pixels.

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