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“Screen Capture” a Whole Web Page on Mac OS X

[Ignore this if you’re not a web geek.]

So, back in my Windows days, I was a fan of HyperSnap, a screen-capture tool that could “auto-scroll” Web pages, which saves one from having to capture one portion, scroll down, capture another portion, then bring those into an image editor, and stitch them.

On Mac OS X, no tool offers this functionality. But I just figured out a way to do it. Maybe somebody else did, but I couldn’t find it.

1. In your web browser (I use Safari), go to Page Setup.

2. In the Settings menu, select “Custom Paper Size”

3. Click “New”

4. Enter the dimensions for your paper — make sure it’s bigger than a typical web page you’d want (I’ve got 11″ x 33″)

5. Give those dimensions a name (e.g., “Screen Capture”)

6. In the Settings Menu, return to “Page Attributes”

7. In Paper Size, select your custom name.

8. On the web page you want to capture, select Print…

9. Choose “Preview…”

10. This will open the page in Preview. You can Command-C to Copy, and then Paste it into wherever you want it.

This might seem onerous, but you only have to do the basic set-up (1-7) once. From then on, it’s just “Print” to Preview, cut, and paste!

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  2. Hey Peter,

    You can also CMD-P a page to print it, but save as a PDF and a great big PDF of the whole page will appear (except it may be broken up by multiple pages…).

  3. I’ve been struggling with this as well. This is good if you just want to get a screen capture of the content of the page, but it fails with many sites that specify an alternate print style sheet. When I need to capture all of the screen exactly as it appears in the browser, I unfortunately have been using the last tedious resort — use Snapz Pro X to capture a selection, scroll, repeat and then glue the captures back together in Photoshop. It’s such a time waster. I hope HyperSnap gets an OS X version working soon, because based on what I’ve read on the Snapz Pro bulletin board, there is no plan to offer window scrolling screen captures.

  4. SnapWeb looks like the application we’ve been wanting on OS X. Works with Safari 1.0 and can produce PDF, PNG or JPEGs of long web pages.

  6. Hey Peter,
    thanks for the great tutorial i’ve been trying to find the same functionality as hyper snap for OsX too. I stumbled onto the st clair software mac version of hyper-snap but it is only os9… ive emailed the guy multiple times to build an osx version. have you tried the snapweb program that the user above mentioned? if you have please let me know how it worked for you… i’m running osx tiger.

    thanks!
    j

    (spamraiderjam@yahoo.com)

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