Randomn3ss — Quick and easy screen captures in Firefox

Quick and easy screen captures in Firefox

In my daily job of network administration and IT hell, I have to report a lot of errors to outside vendors for web-based products. Usually this will include a screenshot of some sort to visually show them what I am talking about. Up until a few weeks ago, this usually meant hitting the Print Screen keyboard button (on Windows) and then opening up some sort of image editing program, usually Photoshop. This method works fine, however launching Photoshop can be somewhat slow on my work computer and I needed to crop out my computer’s taskbar and any other information I didn’t want to send to the vendor. Using the Print Screen function also limited to what was seen on the screen alone, even though I’m running 1280×1024, often times I need to capture an entire web page that might be two or three pages worth of scrolling, Print Screen won’t work here.

My solution is Pearl Crescent Page Saver, a Firefox add-on. This small add-on adds an icon to the Firefox toolbar that is not intrusive and can also be controlled by keyboard shortcuts that are 100% user defined. The two main options for screen shots are

Save image of viewable portion as…
Save image of entire page as…

These two options will fit just about any need you have for grabbing web-based content. It does not capture your browser, desktop, Windows taskbar, etc., and will save the output in nearly any format you choose, I prefer .png. This eliminates the need for launching Photoshop or other image editor, thus saving you time and making you more productive.

Currently there are two ways to install the add-on, the basic version, which I use, and a paid Pro version that adds the ability to live crop what you need from the web page. I have not yet found a need for this feature and belive that the free version will work for nearly everyone.

Keep in mind that this add-on will only capture what is in your Firefox browser, if you need screen captures of other items, like your desktop or programs running, this won’t help.