How to take a full page screenshot in Chrome

There are two reliable ways to capture an entire web page in Chrome, including everything below the fold. Chrome has a built-in command hidden in DevTools that needs no extension, and it works well for a quick, plain PNG. If you need annotation, PDF output, or a page that does anything unusual, an extension does the job in one click.

Both methods are covered below, in that order, with the limits of each stated plainly.

Method 1: Chrome's built-in DevTools command

Chrome can capture a full page on its own, with nothing installed. The command lives in the DevTools command menu, which is why most people never find it.

1. Open the page you want to capture.
2. Open DevTools with F12, or Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Option+I on macOS.
3. Open the command menu with Ctrl+Shift+P, or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS.
4. Type screenshot.
5. Choose Capture full size screenshot.

Chrome downloads a PNG of the whole page. The same menu also offers Capture node screenshot, which captures whichever element is selected in the Elements panel, and Capture area screenshot for a drag-selected region.

Where the built-in method falls down

It is genuinely useful and it is free, so try it first. These are the cases where it stops being enough:

• No annotation. You get a raw PNG. Arrows, highlights, text and redaction all have to happen somewhere else.
• No PDF. PNG only. Printing to PDF is a separate flow with different pagination and different results.
• Sticky and fixed elements. A sticky header or a floating cookie banner can end up repeated down the image, or stamped across the middle of it.
• Very tall pages. Beyond a certain height the capture can come back truncated or blank, because the rendering has hard size limits.
• Web apps that scroll inside a panel. If the page body barely scrolls and the real content lives in an inner container, as in many mail and chat apps, the capture is effectively just the viewport.
• Repetition. Four keystrokes and a menu search, every single time.

Method 2: capture in one click with Screencappy

Screencappy is a free extension that saves the whole page in one click and opens it straight into an editor. Everything happens on your own computer: no account, no cloud service, and no tracking. It cannot see the page you are on until you ask it to.

1. Add it to your browser. Screencappy is on its way to the Chrome Web Store, so for now you add it yourself: download screencappy.zip and unzip it, open chrome://extensions, switch on Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and choose the folder you unzipped. There are pictures of these steps on the home page.
2. Open the page you want to capture.
3. Click the Screencappy button in your toolbar, or press Alt+Shift+P.
4. The capture opens in an editor tab. Draw on it or blur things out if you want to.
5. Save it as a PNG, JPEG, WebP or PDF, or copy it straight to your clipboard.

The same file works in Edge, Opera and Brave. There is a Firefox version too, which does the scroll and stitch capture.

How to screenshot only part of a page

Three of Screencappy's four capture modes take less than the whole page:

• Visible area (Alt+Shift+V): exactly what is on screen right now.
• Select a region (Alt+Shift+S): drag a box. You can scroll mid-selection, so the region can be taller than the viewport.
• Pick an element: hover to highlight the node under the cursor, the way the DevTools inspector does, then click to capture exactly that element. A scrollable container comes back with all of its content, and an iframe comes back in full rather than just the part visible inside its box.

How to save a full page screenshot as a PDF

In the editor, choose PDF as the export format. You can produce one tall page that matches the capture, or paginate it to A4 or Letter.

If what you actually need is a PDF whose text can be selected and searched, rather than a picture of the page, right-click and choose Save as searchable PDF. That prints the live page through the Chrome DevTools Protocol into a real text PDF. It uses the debugger permission, which Screencappy declares when you install it because Chrome does not allow that one to be requested later. Chrome shows a banner across the top of the page while the capture runs.

How to capture a page that is extremely long

Very tall pages are where most screenshot tools break, because browsers cap how large a single canvas can be. Screencappy holds the composed image as strips rather than one canvas, so pages past that ceiling still render. If the result is too large for one file, the export splits into numbered files or additional PDF pages instead of failing.

For pages that load more content as you scroll, turn on auto-load in Settings. Screencappy keeps scrolling until the page stops growing, within a height and time budget, and captures what has loaded.

How to capture a page at mobile width

Right-click and choose the mobile capture option. Screencappy reflows the page to a phone-width layout using device emulation, captures the full mobile page, and leaves your actual window at its normal size. The emulated width is configurable in Settings.

Which method should you use?

More detail on permissions, storage and export formats is on the FAQ. If you arrived here looking for a replacement for a paid tool, the GoFullPage alternative page has the comparison.