Archive for August, 2009

If you find yourself taking screenshots a lot, you no doubt dumped Mac OSX’s built-in screen capture utility long ago. My preferred screen capture app is Snapz Pro. But the one area that few apps do well is capture an entire Web page (including the portion not currently on screen). There are a few stand-alone apps that can do this, but most require you to manually type the URL into the app for it to work.

Since I use Firefox, I have a few options available that are fully integrated into the browser to accomplish the task. My favorite is Pearl Crescent Page Saver (PCPS). PCPS adds a little camera icon to your toolbar that allows you to save an entire Web page, the visible portion of the page, or a single frame on the page as a .jpg or .png file. If you don’t care for a button in the toolbar, you can also assign a keyboard shortcut, or use the contextual menu it adds to the browser. PCPS works perfectly capturing a page, including a page containing Flash content, an area that many screen capture utilities seem to have great difficulty with. PCPS offers several more configuration options that make working with it a productive experience, particularly for bloggers with a fixed-width site. PCPS not only allows you to set the file format, including the JPG quality, but you can customize the output size of the image by percentage or pixel-width dimensions. Your image is ready to upload immediately. You can even have a custom naming convention set up via the preferences. There are several add-ons that offer screen-capture capability to Firefox, but I’ve found Pearl Crescent Page Saver to be stable, reliable, and offering just enough in the way of customization to satisfy my needs.