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How-to
How to take a full page screenshot in Chrome
Chrome can screenshot an entire web page without any extension: the command is just hidden inside DevTools. That method is free and instantaneous, and it fails in three specific ways that are worth knowing before you rely on it for anything that matters. All four methods are below, with the failure modes attached to each.
Method 1: Chrome's built-in capture, no extension needed
Chrome has shipped this since the DevTools command menu existed. Most people have simply never found it.
Scroll to the bottom of the page first, then back to the top. This step is not optional on modern sites and it is the one everybody skips; see below for why.
Open DevTools: F12 on Windows or Linux, ⌘⌥I on a Mac.
Open the command menu: Ctrl⇧P or ⌘⇧P.
Type
screenshot. Pick Capture full size screenshot.
A PNG of the whole page lands in your downloads folder. The same menu also offers Capture area screenshot for a region and Capture node screenshot, which photographs whichever element is selected in the Elements panel, and genuinely useful for grabbing one component cleanly.
What it cannot do: PNG only: no JPEG, no PDF. No cropping or annotation. No scrolling before capture, so lazy-loaded images are frequently missing. And on app-style pages that scroll an inner pane rather than the document, it returns roughly one screenful.
Method 2: a full page screenshot extension
The reason extensions exist for a thing Chrome already does is that they solve the failure cases. A good one scrolls the page in viewport-sized steps, waits for each step to settle so lazy content loads, photographs each frame, and stitches them, which means it captures what you would actually see if you scrolled, rather than what the renderer thinks the page is.
The workflow, with the extension I build:
- Click the toolbar icon, or press ⌘⇧Y. There is no panel to open first.
- It scrolls, captures and stitches, showing progress on the icon. Click again to cancel.
- The preview opens by itself. Crop, annotate or redact, then copy to clipboard or export PNG, JPEG or PDF.
Which extension to use is a real question, and one that got sharper in August 2026 when GoFullPage, the category's most-installed tool, with eleven million users, was removed from the Chrome Web Store. The roundup of the options compares them on permissions and pricing rather than feature-list length.
Method 3: print to PDF
Ctrl/⌘P → destination Save as PDF. This is not a screenshot; it is the page re-laid-out for paper, using the site's print stylesheet. Some sites have a beautiful one. Many have none, and you get a broken layout, missing background images, or navigation that prints on every page.
When you want a PDF that looks exactly like the page on screen, capture the page as an image and export that to PDF, and the layout is preserved by definition, because it is a photograph. That path is covered in saving a full page screenshot as a PDF.
Method 4: Chrome on Android and iPhone
On Android, take a normal screenshot, then tap Capture more (or "Scroll capture" / "Extended screenshot", depending on the manufacturer) and drag the handles to extend it down the page.
On iPhone, this only works in Safari, not Chrome: take a screenshot, tap the preview thumbnail, and choose the Full Page tab. The result saves as a PDF to Files. Chrome for iOS has no equivalent, so for a full-page capture on an iPhone you either open the page in Safari or use a desktop browser.
Chrome extensions do not run on Chrome for Android or iOS at all: the mobile browsers have no extension support, so any extension-based method is desktop-only.
When it goes wrong
Parts of the screenshot are blank, grey or show placeholder boxes
Lazy loading. Images below the fold are not fetched until you scroll near them, so a capture taken without scrolling photographs their empty placeholders. The fix is mechanical: scroll slowly to the bottom, wait until everything has drawn, scroll back to the top, then capture. Tools that scroll as part of capturing get this right automatically; a single-render capture never can.
The navigation bar repeats down the middle of the image
A sticky or fixed header stays glued to the viewport as the page scrolls,
so it appears in every frame and gets stitched in at regular intervals.
Same for cookie banners, chat bubbles and floating CTAs. The workaround
without a tool that handles it: open DevTools, select the pinned element,
and set display: none before capturing. The reason this is
worth the fuss is that the alternative, hiding elements by CSS rule, depends on the page cooperating, and single-page apps frequently re-render
the bar back into existence mid-capture.
Nothing scrolls: the tool returns one screen
You are on an app-shell page. Mail clients, dashboards, admin panels,
social feeds and documentation apps pin html and
body to the viewport and scroll an inner container instead,
so as far as the browser is concerned the document is exactly one screen
tall. Capture tools that assume the document scrolls will hand back one
frame. The ones that work detect the scrolling pane and walk that instead.
Very long pages fail, or come out downscaled
Browser canvases have hard size limits, and captures are taken at your display's pixel ratio, and a long page on a retina screen is routinely fifty megapixels. Past a certain height something has to give: either the tool reduces resolution, or the capture fails. Frame-by-frame stitching survives much longer pages than a single render, because it never holds more than one frame in memory at a time.
The screenshot is enormous as a PDF
Because the embedded image is enormous. No JPEG quality slider rescues fifty megapixels. The thing to reduce is the embedded image's resolution, since halving its linear size quarters the pixel count. Done properly, the page geometry is computed from the original dimensions so the document keeps its size while the file shrinks: a typical long page goes from around 5 MB to about 1.4 MB.
Skip all four failure modes
Full Page Screenshot scrolls before it captures, keeps sticky headers out of every frame but the first, finds the inner pane on app pages, and exports PNG, JPEG or PDF with cropping and annotation included. Free, no account, and it makes no network requests at all.
FAQ
Does Chrome have a built-in full page screenshot?
Yes. DevTools → command menu (Ctrl/⌘⇧P) → "Capture full size screenshot". PNG only, no editing, and it does not scroll the page first.
Is there a keyboard shortcut for a full page screenshot in Chrome?
Not by default; the built-in command lives in the DevTools menu. You can assign one to an extension at chrome://extensions/shortcuts; this one ships with ⌘⇧Y bound already.
How do I take a full page screenshot on a Mac?
⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4 only capture what is on screen, so for a whole web page use Chrome's DevTools command or an extension. In Safari specifically, the built-in screenshot preview offers a Full Page tab that exports a PDF.
How do I screenshot a whole page on Windows?
Print Screen and Snipping Tool capture the screen, not the document, so they stop at the fold. Use the DevTools command above or a full-page extension; both capture the entire page regardless of window size.
Can I capture a page I'm logged into?
With a browser extension, yes: it photographs the page your browser has already rendered, session and all. Server-side screenshot services cannot, because they are not logged in as you.
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