Get Your Free Fix Of Web Page Snapshots.

If Mac applications and utilities are entering a Golden Age, then so be it. Who could complain?

These days there are more choices between very good and free, and excellent and pay the price. Here’s one of the former.

Simply put, you want to take a picture of a web page. Seriously, that’s it. How many ways are there?

Assume that you’re using Mac OS X Tiger and you’re using Safari, though it doesn’t really matter which browser.

You’ve come upon a web site and you’d like to capture the site to review later. And, you’d like to capture the home page as a graphic image.

Remember, the whole objective here is to capture something and not spend any money in the process.

Using Safari, you could simply click File/Save As/Web Archive. That’ll save the page, but not the site, but it’s a start.

What if the site has 10 or 20 or more pages that you’d like to save? That’s too much clicking for Safari, but not for SiteSucker.

SiteSucker does what it says it does. It sucks. Well, it sucks sites. All the pages, links, graphics, etc. It all gets sucked into a folder on your Mac.

It’ll download pretty much everything you need to recreate the web site in a folder on your Mac. It even localizes the site’s links so they work on your Mac while offline.

We’ve gone from one end of the scale to the other. Point, click, save as-- to save the whole site using more preferences than Paris Hilton.

In between is Netfixer with an utterly simple and straightforward solution to capturing a web page as a graphic. I’ll get to the price after I’ve tempted you with the utility and value.

NetFixer does one thing, has few preferences, and is so eacy that your grandmother’s grandmother could do it (assuming you’re younger than you look).

Open NetFixer, select a size for the page (640x480, 800x600, or wider at 1024x768).

Then select a file format for the image output. PNG, GIF, TIFF, JPG, or BMP. Still with me? That wasn’t too hard, was it?

Then click the Shot It button. Don’t ask. ”Shot It” doesn’t really fit for a future tense action, but if you click it you start the ball rolling, and it works.

Click the Shot It button, enter the URL of the web page you want to capture, and then click the Shot! button (see, it still doesn’t make sense).

A dialog box will ask you where you want to save the ”shotted” graphic. Click Save and wait a few seconds.

NetFixer goes to the web site’s URL, grabs the site from top to bottom and saves it where you told it to save it, and in your choice of graphic formats.

Yes, NetFixer could have more preferences. But it doesn’t. It could use language better than ”Shot It” or ”Shot” or ”Shotted” but you get the idea, right?

Even if the web site you want an image of is ultra long, say, like Mac360’s articles, NetFixer doesn’t care. It grabs everything from top to bottom.

Did I mention that NetFixer is free.

Capturing web sites, web pages, as whole sites or as graphics is no longer a chore, and many solutions are free. The question is, why do you need to do it?

What’s your purpose when capturing a site? Archiving? Presentations? If you do, when you do, why do you capture sites or images, and what tools do you use?

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