• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Foliovision

Making the web work for you

Main navigation

  • Weblog
    • FV Player
    • WordPress
    • Video of the Week
    • Case Studies
    • Business
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Meet the Team
    • We Support
    • Careers
    • Contact
    • Pricing
  • Products
  • Support
    • FV Player Docs
    • Pro Support
  • Login
  • Basket is empty
Affordable VAST/VPAID for Wordpress has arrived. Serve ads with your videos starting today!

Three Ways to take Full Length Website Screenshots on OS X

26 June 2013 / Alec Kinnear / Leave a Comment

As a web design and marketing company, we often have to take full length web screenshots. Shooting one screen at a time and putting it all together in an image editor like Photoshop afterwards is so 2000.

If you do want to do it the hard way, you just need to use the built-in shift-command 3 (whole screen) or shift-command 4 (selection) and grab the images from your desktop.

Here are the various tools we use to make full length website screenshots easier:

Layers

Layers is a really powerful  screenshot tool which shoots your whole screen but in its attendant layers, allowing you to isolate elements. It’s fantastic for an OS or application developer building documentation or an application designer creating prototype interfaces and has a great function for web designers, Web shots which will shoot any Safari or Webkit browser window from head to toe. Afterwards you do have to crop off the browser chrome but Layers works consistently and allows you to screenshot password protected and https pages (as it shoots the window and not the URL).

I’m not sure how well Layers works on 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion. Performance in Snow Leopard is acceptable, although it occasionally does choke and misbehave.

Netfixer

Netfixer is just a plugin the URL and go tool. Works great and fast. Totally reliable on Snow Leoapard 10.6.8. I’m not sure why our friends at Shiny Frog abandoned Netfixer. Netfixer never took off in popularity. Probably because of the very silly name. I warned them about that. We have a brilliant front ends comment manager for WordPress called Thoughtful Comments which never took off either despite the occasional rave review asking the same question. Not sure if Netfixer works in later builds. The open source Netfixer repository is here. Here’s a link to a zip of a .2 build from 2006 which still works fine on Snow Leopard.

Netfixer is not enough for us as we often want to shoot https pages which fail.

Paparazzi!

At last a website screenshot utility with a decent name. I’ve always wanted to like Paparazzi on the name alone. The original icon was quite sexy too, even if it is not high enough res for modern versions of OS X. Unfortunately Paparazzi! has failed quite a bit depending on your OS version. The current 0.6.7, the first public release since 0.4.3 (I smell private internal revisions/fixes which never went out to the public: not very nice), works great on 10.6.8 and allows you to screenshot to the width you want. This is really useful for a web designer to give examples to a client of the effect of a design on different devices.

Paparazzi! also has preferences to allow click-to-flash, choose custom stylesheets, choose user-agent and to accept all https certificates (superb!) by default. There’s even some preferences for batch screenshots (not sure why someone would want screenshots of a whole website, but it’s nice that derail cares enough to offer them: I guess for law enforcement or legal reasons batch might come in handy).

The new Paparazzi! works great and it’s the full length website screenshot tool we recommend. 0.6.7 is so fresh that there are no development notes yet but hopefully they will come soon.

Note: We know there are some full length screenshot tools for Firefox and may be for Chromium too. We don’t  use the Firefox versions as we have enough developer extensions enabled on Firefox, that often the display would end up being non-standard anyway (some little SEO colours or flags somewhere or Flash disable). Getting Firefox into condition for proper screenshots would be five or ten minutes/pop depending how often one does it. And even then one would have a trace of doubt if the screenshot was accurate or not.

Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.

Categories: Design, IT Tags: Design, screenshots, web development

Related Posts

  1. OS X Long Webpage Screenshot Shootout: Paparazzi, Screengrab, Layers, Netfixer

  2. Firefox Quickfind: Hard to Type an Apostrophe

    Firefox Quickfind: Hard to Type an Apostrophe

  3. Cloud Hosting Providers where videos cannot be stored for playback on your website: OneDrive, ADrive, Dropbox

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You can click here to Subscribe without commenting

Primary Sidebar

My Account

  • My Licenses
  • My Profile
  • Invoices
  • Affiliate Area
  • Log Out

Categories

  • Business
  • Camera Reviews
  • Case Studies
  • Design
  • Flowplayer
  • Internet Marketing
  • IT
  • Life
  • SEO
  • Slovak
  • Video of the Week
  • WordPress

Footer

Our Plugins

  • FV WordPress Flowplayer
  • FV Thoughtful Comments
  • FV Simpler SEO
  • FV Antispam
  • FV Gravatar Cache
  • FV Testimonials

Free Tools

  • Pandoc Online
  • Article spinner
  • WordPress Password Finder
  • Delete LinkedIn Account
  • Responsive Design Calculator
Foliovision logo
All materials © 2023 Foliovision s.r.o. | Panská 12 - 81101 Bratislava - Slovakia | info@foliovision.com
  • This Site Uses Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Tel. ‭+421 2/5292 0086‬

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in settings.

Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie allow you to log in and download your software or post to forums.

We use the WordPress login cookie and the session cookie.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Support Cookies

Foliovision.com uses self-hosted Rocket.chat and self-hosted Freescout support desk to provide support for FV Player users. These cookies allow our visitors to chat with us and/or submit support tickets.

We are delighted to recommend self-hosted Rocket.chat and especially Freescout to other privacy-conscious independent publishers who would prefer to self-host support.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

3rd Party Cookies

This website uses Google Analytics and Statcounter to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

We reluctantly use Google Analytics as it helps us to test FV Player against popular Google Analytics features. Feel free to turn off these cookies if they make you feel uncomfortable.

Statcounter is an independent Irish stats service which we have been using since the beginning of recorded time, sixteen years ago.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!