Screenshot Utilities for Web Pages

Saturday, May 10, 2008

I need to take a lot of screenshots of webpages for my presentations, projects and websites. I have been using some easy to use browser screenshot utilities for quite some time now. After observing some friends taking screenshots the hard-way (by coping multiple parts on paint and joining them), I thought it would be wise to share these tools.

When you take screenshots of webpages from the browser, it is mostly impossible to capture the complete webpage. Also, you might not like the browser window with your shot. There are many utilities to help you solve these problems. Here are a couple of them which I use:

FireShot: This is an extension for Firefox that can capture the screenshot of the webpage you are viewing in just two clicks. It provides an option to capture the entire web page or only visible part of the page. The captured image opens up in an editor having a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Screenshots can be uploaded to server, saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing.

ThumbPage: This is a small software application which allows you to generate thumbnails for a webpage. It can be conveniently used to generate thumbnails of any size and type. Thumbnails for multiple pages can be generated together by adding multiple URLs. Its ideally suited for generating icons of the webpages. I have been using this utility for generating thumbnails of my projects, which I've used in the work page on my website.