Screen Capture Full Length Webpages
A number of people have asked how we produced the full length website screen captures in some of our posts. The answer is a simple freeware application called Paparazzi.
Paparazzi is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages a two click process and if you have ever tried to take a screenshot of a website that is longer than the viewable area of the screen you will know how tricky it can be.
Paparazzi is a great tool for making handouts or if you have to make a website as part of an assignment it offers a really easy way of documenting longer pages.
Using the software is very easy. Load up Paparazzi and type the URL you want to capture. Hit the capture button.
Click the ‘Save Image As’ button at the bottom of the interface to save the screen shot.
Paparazzi offers a range of screen resolution and capture sizes and can save the file in a range of image format and sizes. We tend to opt for a full size capture and then resize and tweak the image in Photoshop.
Paparazzi hasn’t been updated since 2006, actually it had to revert a version when Leopard was released. It really is a great bit of freeware and is still available for download at Derailer.org
Would saving as PDF work, and then converting it to jpg/gif/whatever in Photoshop (or even Preview, probably)?
Bert
Saving as PDF doesn’t work, as the PDF runs over the number of pages needed to print the actual content (according to your printer default settings)
Paparazzi is really handy, works also with a bookmarklet (there is a paparazzi:// URL scheme) : just add the below code :
–
javascript:location.href=’paparazzi:’+location.href;
–
Unluckily, it will not work for sites that rely on sessions for navigation as it loads the page as a different “browser” instance than the one you were looking at the page in, when you call Paparazzi.
The very latest version that only works on tiger allowed session access. If I remember right it actually worked a little like a browser so you could enter usernames and passwords to gain access to the pages you wanted to grab. I used it for a few Moodle hand outs.
Real shame the application has not been developed any further. Apps like little snapper (http://www.digmo.co.uk/software/little-snapper-mini-review/) come in to their own and I guess are much more powerful but are not free