How to take screenshots of an entire webpage

Sometimes, the desktop screenshot utilities are not enough when you want to take screenshot of a webpage, because these tools can capture only the visible portion of the page. So how do you capture the complete page from the top to the bottom without having to stitch multiple images together? Here is how to do it.

The easiest way is by using a Firefox addon called Screengrab. Screengrab allows you to take screenshot of an entire page, or the visible portion or just a small selection of the page. It even allows you to save just the contents of an individual frame.

See how this site looks like when captured entirely.

If you don’t want to burden Firefox with another addon, you can try some standalone tools. Webshots is the best among them.

WebShot allows you to take screenshots of web pages and save them as full sized images or thumbnails, in the JPG, GIF, PNG, or BMP formats. You don’t have to open the page in your browser – just type the URL and click Start.

Webshots has the capability of automatically determining the page width and height and captures the whole page accurately. It even supports batch processing, where you can specify multiple URLs at once. The only letdown in this application is that it uses the IE engine to render the pages. So sites that aren’t optimized for IE will result in a broken screenshot. But then, you can always use Screengrab for such sites.

If you are predominantly an IE user, then use IE Screenshot Free. IE Screenshot Free will automatically scroll down the Web page you need, combine its parts into one image and save the final screenshot in one handy file.

IE Screenshot is compatible with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 5.5 and above.