I recently wrote an article explaining how to take a screenshot after I was asked me that very question. I believe many of the commercial screenshot-taking applications on the market today certainly confuse the issue. Hopefully my article answered a lot of the questions about this frequently overlooked tool, but one thing that I didn’t cover was a method to capture webpages that are longer than what appears on screen. This was one of the features from TechSmith’s Snag-It that I actually liked, but the free version of the application WebShot will allow you to do this with a number of configurable settings.
After downloading the 610KB installer from the WebShot homepage at http://www.websitescreenshots.com/. Run through the quick installer and you’re all set. The only requirement, I believe, is Internet Explorer on Windows XP or a more recent version of the Windows operating system. Run the WebShot application and you’ll be greeted with this window:
For a simple shot of a single page, just enter the URL into the box and say where you want the image saved and in what format. WebShot can save the screenshot as a jpeg, png, bmp, or gif file. You can configure the file to be automatically named uniquely with a variety of variables. This table describes the variables and their values:
| Mask | Value |
| %m | Url Md5 Hash (Default) |
| %h | Url Hostname |
| %d | Url Domain name |
| %e | Url Domain name without Tld |
| %p | Url Path |
| %u | Page Title |
| %l | Literal Timestamp (20060130120505 / YMDHMS) |
| %t | Unix Timestamp |
Along with the file name, you can configure the image size and quality as well as if you want the image or the image folder to open when it completes. The browser size and time out lengths can be configured too. You can also set up WebShot to capture a batch of URLs. Just create a list of web addresses in a text file and under the Multiple tab, point WebShot at that text file. Here’s a thumbnail of a screenshot taken by WebShot, click for the full image:
One thing to note is that there is no annoying scroll bar jumping along the side in this image. SnagIt (at least the last version that I saw this on) would have a scrollbar on the side jumping down every page or so, WebShot doesn’t have that issue.
If screenshots and capturing web pages falls into your bag of tricks, check out WebShot for an easy application to handle pages that are longer than what fits on the screen.