How to make screenshot/jpg/pdf of ENTIRE long Safari window (not just visible part)?

roam --

In my initial post, I specifically said:

"Is there any native way within the 10.6 OS that allows users to capture an entire long Safari window as an image file (not as a Web Archive, but as an image file composed of pixels)..."

...so your recommendation, while well-intentioned, is NOT the solution I'm seeking. I don't want a Web Archive made of html code and hot links and all that, what I want is a photographic image of exactly what an entire Web page looks like, a single jpeg or PNG file composed of pixels and nothing else, just like any image file.

Austin Kinsella1: "...print to PDF is the solution."

Actually, it probably isn't. The reason I never went to much effort trying to solve the Safari-print problem is that in my experience with other Web browsers and with Safari on other machines, the "Save as PDF" option in the print window does NOT necessarily create an exact "snapshot" of what the Web page looks like when displayed on my screen. In fact, just now, repeating an experiment I did earlier, I opened and ran Firefox (which doesn't cause a spinning ball when I try to print with it) and I opened a sample long Web page, chose "Print," selected "Save as PDF," but the resulting PDF had two problems: Firstly and most importantly, it was a different rendering of the page, more simplified, with various graphic features absent. I think that many sites like newspapers and blogs and so forth have in their underlying html code a "print version" of each page which is only accessed when the page is being printed (or in our case saved as a PDF). This defeats the purpose of what I'm trying to achieve -- get an exact picture of how the page appears in the browser, and not get a printout which is has the same content but which is conveniently formatted for printing ease. And secondly, "Save as PDF" creates a multi-page PDF rather than a single long continuous image. (And I've also wrestled with how to automate converting a multi-page PDFs to a single long jpeg, and I've yet to find a good way that doesn't require manual image-by-image editing.) Because of those two reasons, I've never had much optimism about how successful "Save to PDF" would even be if I got it to work in Safari. Perhaps some old-school primitive pages would be saved in a PDF that looked exactly like the screen image, but I suspect most wouldn't.

jsd2:

Yes, in fact Paparazzi! was the very first freeware I downloaded and tried. But for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

Subsequently, I downloaded at least 12 different freewares that advertised having various wonderful capabilities regarding screenshots and so forth, but not a single one had the capacity to get a screenshot of a long window that extended below the visible screen area.

In most cases, I definitively ascertained that the applications did not have that feature. But in a few cases the software was so confusing and poorly designed that I simply gave up trying to figure out how to make the program work. Paparazzi was one of those cases where I just gave up. I'll return to it now and try to decipher its user interface and try to get it to work again to definitely determine whether it does what I want or not, but I'm not optimistic about my chances.

ethereality: "My first thought was also print to PDF. If it must be an image, though, one can open the PDF with gimp and save it as an image."

Yes, but one must have a PDF that reflects the actual Web page in the first place, and as you noted in your follow-up comment, in many cases the PDF is a "formatted for printing" version of the Web page. So opening the PDF and rendering it as an image using "gimp" still wouldn't solve the original problem of the PDF not being a snapshot of the actual Web page.

And no, I don't know anything about Mountain Lion (and don't plan to get it), so I don't know if it solved this "problem" (nor do I yet know if this issue is indeed a "problem" or is instead just reflective of my ignorance of the ins and outs of 10.6 -- I still think there must be some very-little-known built-in screenshot keyboard shortcut that does exactly what I'm looking for).

Woo-hoo!

After fiddling with Paparazzi! for another 40 minutes, I finally deciphered (through trial-and-error) how to maneuver through its awkward user-interface to an extent that I was finally able to make it "work" -- at least work sufficiently for my purposes. And lo and behold, it does indeed have the capacity to capture a screenshot of an entire long Web page, including the portion not visible on the screen. In fact my first attempt was to experiment with this very page of our thread on Apple "Discussions" about how to solve this problem -- and I got Paparazzi! to save it as a jpeg!! The whole thread, top to bottom, exactly as on the screen, not re-formatted for printing. The final file size was 985 pixels wide by 4,204 pixels long (1.2mb).

I have since experimented with a couple other pages and had success with them as well.

HOWEVER, I can't guarantee that Paparazzi! will work with every page on the Web, because I think one of the problems when I first attempted to use it was that the page I was trying to get a screenshot of contained a lot of Flash elements and other data-heavy widgets, and I think those messed up Paparazzi!'s memory or overwhelmed it or something. But perhaps such huge and problematic pages are rare enough to not be much of an issue using Paparazzi! under normal circumstances.

So, I'll consider this problem "solved," and give user "jsd2" a "This helped me" star, since even though I already had Paparazzi! he encouraged me to revisit it.

And for the record to help those who might stumble on this thread in the future seeking a solution to the same problem:

The freeware program to get is called "Paparazzi!" and is available directly on the developers site here:

http://derailer.org/paparazzi/

Also, note that the current version only works with 10.6.8 or later, but if you have a previous version of the Mac OS, the developer helpfully maintains an archive of older releases that work with older OS versions -- you can access the old (and new) versions here:

http://derailer.org/paparazzi/downloads

It's also available for free download on various popular third-party sites, like:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15966/paparazzi!

Be warned that Paparazzi! does not have a very intuitive user interface, nor a user manual, so be patient with it and you should be able to figure out how to make it work.

If you want another application that also does the trick and which has a simpler and better user experience, but you don't mind paying money to buy it, you can purchase and download "SnapWeb" on its developer's site here:

http://www.tribalmedia.com/bts/snapweb/snapweb.html

And if anybody seeing this in the future knows whether or not there is a native way to capture entire Web pages built in to 10.6, please post the info here. Thanks!

jsd2 --

Thanks for explaining to everyone how to use Paparazzi! Finally worked for me as well. Gave you a star.