How to slow down google's image search page load?

November 13, 2016 11:40 AM

Bear with me. In the split second between hitting enter and the results loading, google throws up a bunch of place-holder colored blocks that reflect the color of the individual images that will eventually load. I want to grab a screen capture of the page of the colored blocks.

You can see the behavior by clicking examples 1, 2, 3.

After a ridiculous number of tries, I haven't been able to grab fast enough. I've looked at Sloppy, but it's not playing nice with Java anymore and has crashed on me a few times.

Relevant: Yosemite, Chrome, FF, Safari.

posted by cocoagirl to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: In Chrome, press Cmd + Opt + I to bring up the developer tool box-- then click on the `Network` tab, and click on the `No Throttle` option on the right-- try GPRS (50Kb/s) speed, or if even that is too quick, make a custom speed to limit the connection to a snails pace. Oh and check 'Disable Cache' too-- so the images already cached on your drives get loaded each refresh.
posted by Static Vagabond at 11:56 AM on November 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

Static Vagabond has it! See the sapphires. In fact, GPRS was so slow that I thought it wasn't working at all at first, but there was plenty of time to take the screenshot. FWIW my DSL connection is fast enough that I don't even see those boxes (took a screen recording to check just in case it was too fast to see).
posted by wnissen at 12:11 PM on November 13, 2016

Or you can let the page load normally, then open the developer tools, choose the option from the menu to 'undock to a separate window', then remove the images by running the following code from the console tab:

Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('#search img')).map((n) => n.parentNode.removeChild(n))
posted by gregjones at 12:14 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would just do a screen recording with something like Quicktime, play it back, pause on the moment you want, and screen cap that.
posted by joan_holloway at 12:16 PM on November 13, 2016

Response by poster: Yes! Thanks static vagabond!
posted by cocoagirl at 12:36 PM on November 13, 2016