You can't use the Mac's built-in screenshot tool to get an entire web page, just the visible portion. But you can use a simple function in Safari to do it quickly and easily.
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Video Summary
In This Tutorial
Learn how to capture an entire webpage on your Mac as a single image, compress it if needed, and handle very large pages where Live Text may not work.
The Screenshot Tool Won't Get You the Whole Web Page (00:21)
- Default macOS screenshot tools like Shift Command 5 only capture the visible portion of a webpage.
- Even capturing a whole window in the tool won’t include content below the visible area.
- Older workarounds required developer tools, third-party browsers, or extensions.
Capture the Whole Web Page With a Safari Function (01:02)
- Use Safari’s File > Save As to capture an entire webpage.
- Change the Format option to PNG to save the page as a single long image.
- The resulting PNG can be viewed in Preview and scrolls through the entire page.
Compress the Resulting Image (02:15)
- PNG files can be large, especially with long pages.
- Open the PNG in Preview and use File > Export to save as a JPEG.
- Lower the quality to reduce file size significantly while keeping text fairly readable.
Works For Long Web Pages Too (03:07)
- The same method works even for very long or tall webpages.
- Safari will save a single PNG of the whole page, though file sizes can become very large.
Live Text Doesn't Work On Very Large Images (03:42)
- Extremely large PNGs may disable Live Text in Preview, preventing text selection.
- You can still copy specific portions by selecting an area, copying, and creating a new document from the clipboard.
Summary
You can now save an entire webpage as a PNG in Safari, compress it to a manageable JPEG if needed, and handle very long pages. Just remember that Live Text may not work on extremely large images.
Video Transcript
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can screen capture an entire webpage on your Mac.
So something that was really hard to do until recently on a Mac was to capture entire webpage, that's the entire thing. Not just the visible part. You couldn't do it with the Screen Capture Tool.
So here I am looking at a webpage. If I try to use the Screen Capture Tool, by using one of the many keyboard shortcuts like Shift Command 5, I can use one of the many screen capture tools here if I capture the entire screen but of course that doesn't give me what's further down on the page. Only what's visible. Even if I use Capture Selected Window and then click on the Window what I'm going to get is just the visible part of the window. I won't get what's further down on the webpage.
Now previously there were workarounds for this. You can use some developer tools sometimes to capture a webpage. You can use alternative web browsers and some web browser extensions to do it. But you can do it now using a simple function that's available, not as part of the screen capture tool, but in Safari.
So here I'm with this page and you can see how long it goes here. If I simply go to File and then Save As I get to save the entire page. But it will save as a web archive. In other words it is saving the HTML, images and other elements. It's not really creating an image of the exact look of the pages as it is right now. But if I go down to Format you can see I can change from Web Archive to Page Source, which just gives me the HTML. But I can also go to PNG, an image format that saves a lossless version of this webpage. So now when I save it it's going to be a PNG file. Then when I look at that file here, I'm going to double-click to open it up in Preview, you can see it's the entire page. I can scroll all the way down to the bottom. It is a single image.
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Now if I look at this file here and exam it since it is a lossless PNG, it could be pretty big. Here it is 3.6 megs. It's mostly white background with black text. So it's not too bad. But some of the web pages can be very large. Since you've got it open here in Preview by simple double clicking it, you can go to File and then Export and then choose a compression option. Like, for instance, let's use JPEG here and set the Quality down to somewhere in the middle, like this. You can see I get something that's about 1.3 megs as a JPEG here. I will go and save that on the Desktop as well. If you open that JPEG up you'll be able to see that the quality suffers a little bit around the text but it's really not too bad and if you have to save a lot of them it is worth it to save it in this more compressed format.
This will work for a page no matter how long it is. Here's a truly massive webpage here and if I were to go to File, Save As here and you can see it remembers the last setting for this. So it is going to save it as a PNG. Then the result is going to be this very big PNG file here. If I open it up in Preview you can see how narrow it is. I have to zoom in. I'll zoom into actual size here so you can see it. So this is a pretty large file. Command i gives me 32 megs here. One interesting thing to note is that when you get such a large PNG like this the ability to select text doesn't seem to work. You can see here I can't select text there. Whereas if I go back to that smaller one you'll see that I can actually select text, like that. So maybe just a limitation of Preview or the live text feature on your Mac. You can always go and select an area like this. Command C to Copy and then New From Clipboard. Now you get a smaller document that just has that text and then easily copy from it.
That's how you can save an entire webpage as a screenshot no matter how long it is on your Mac. That feature started somewhere with Sequoia and it's been available in Tahoe and now Golden Gate and beyond. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
That's a great feature. I use Snag-It when I need to do this kind of screen capture but it's a bit clunky. This is much better. Thank you!
When I wanted to save a whole webpage and regardless of MacOS version, I have always simply selected Safari/File/Export as PDF...
Now try to print over several pages.
Thank you
StuM: This is a video about creating an image from a web page. If you are trying to print, use File ▶ Print.
Very helpful, thank you!
When a long web page is captured as 1 page and the resultant .jpeg or .png file is extremely long (and small) using this method, is there a good way to bring it back to normal viewing size if I wanted to print it or save it as a .pdf (not just printing the original web site or the microscopically small .jpeg or .png file using File>Print)?
Example: I would like to store the .jpeg, but then later print it out at normal size.
DB; Not really. For storing web page like that save it as a PDF not an image.
Got it. Thank you.
It didn't work. I have a MacBook Pro and Safari (updated to Golden Gate 27.0.1).
Saving the Safari page of a WordPress webpage to PNG and opening it up in Preview, just captures the visible page, not the entire website page. Am I missing something?
MEng: Make sure you are following along with what I show in the video. Sounds like you are just using the regular screenshot tool.