How to take a full-web-page screenshot
September 15, 2012 7:44 PM

How do I take a screenshot of an entire webpage (difficulty: using functionality built-in to Firefox 9+ or Windows 7, and I accidentally did it yesterday)?

I know of a variety of ways to print a web page to PDF, or capture it in slices, or extract all the images on a page. Not looking for any of those.

Today, I discovered on my desktop a file labelled "www.fark.com screen capture 2012-9-14-10-13-10.png". It contains a nice, tidy pixel-for-pixel capture of the entire height of the Fark front page, about 10 printed pages high (way taller than my actual screen), but not broken into pages.

I have wanted an easy way to do that for years, usually resorting to either some print-to-file tricks or, if I really need an exact screenshot, copy-and-pasting together as many screenshots as it takes. Yet, I somehow managed this one accidentally, meaning I must have taken it by pressing something simple but slightly wrong from whatever I intended, something like ctrl-alt-Q and certainly nothing so complex as to require manual intervention.

I also have no special screencap software installed, so this either came from Windows 7, or from within FireFox.

Anyone know how I managed to do this?

Thanks!
posted by pla to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
There are a zillion browser add-ons that do this. You might not have installed a full program to do it, but did you install a plug-in? One has a little camera on the browser bar that you may have hit.
posted by sageleaf at 7:52 PM on September 15, 2012


I think we can call this done-in-one, thanks!

I didn't make the connection between that and taking screenshots, because I thought it just let me save YouTube videos. :)
posted by pla at 8:09 PM on September 15, 2012


Incidentally, if anyone else wants to know, I have the "Download Youtube Videos + 12.9.6" FireFox plugin installed, which does what I asked for and has an icon exactly like sageleaf described.
posted by pla at 8:14 PM on September 15, 2012


Recent versions of Firefox have this built in: Open the Developer Toolbar and type help screenshot to learn more.

Or, if you want to cheat, just run screenshot filename.png 0 true to save a screenshot to the named file, with no delay, and including the full page.
posted by SemiSophos at 9:45 PM on September 15, 2012


SemiSophos, could you clarify, please? I have FF 15 on Windows 7, and I don't have a Developer Toolbar. If that's an add-on you've installed, what's its name? Or do you mean FF's built-in Web Console? Or something else? Thanks.
posted by exphysicist345 at 11:20 PM on September 15, 2012


Aw, I thought the toolbar made it into Firefox 15, but it looks like I was one version off: it's available in 16 ("Firefox Beta") and newer. Here's a short video showing off the toolbar.
posted by SemiSophos at 2:44 AM on September 16, 2012


There is a grabber you can add.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 4:59 AM on September 16, 2012


@SemiSophos, the toolbar is in FF 15, you have to go to about:config, then enable devtools.toolbar.enable first.
 
posted by querty at 5:16 AM on September 16, 2012


« Older Help me identify this short story   |   Legit or fake Canadian consumer survey? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.