How Do You Capture Web Pages On Your Mac?

Capturing images on your Mac is easy, yet there are many add-on utilities that improve the job.

How about web pages? What’s the best way to capture and save a web page in your browser?

Let me approach this from a few angles, all worthy, though the process, steps, and cost will vary.

First, the free and inexpensive ways to capture web site pages. You’ve already got one on your Mac.

Safari for Mac OS X Tiger has a built-in archive function which captures and saves a web page.

Click on File, select Save As, select Web Archive, and select Save. It’s that easy and it’s free. Problems?

Of course, there are a few problems. You get what you pay for. Only Safari and a few other browsers can read the archive.

The captured page isn’t always exactly the page you captured.

Did I mention Safari’s price?

Also free is Site Sucker, one of my favorite site saving utilities.

Site Sucker, also free, saves entire web sites; web pages, content, advertising, links, everything.

It doesn’t save an image of the site.

So, you’re stuck with a folder full of folders and graphics and pages of the site you sucked (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Blue Crab does the same thing in slightly different ways but has a price tag and runs equally well on Intel and PPC Macs.

Getting the whole web site has benefits and drawbacks when all you’re looking for is an archive image of a web page.

Webstractor is a pricey but effective way of capturing web site content, then editing the content yourself.

If you research web sites and need to keep them organized, Webstractor may be worthy of the price tag.

Much less expensive, yet easy to use, is Brain Tickling Software’s SnapWeb.

Think of SnapWeb as a browser with a save button which, duh, saves the entire web page as an image file; jpg, gif, png, and so on.

Your Mac will also save anything in a browser window, but only that part of the window you can see.

SnapWeb loads the entire web page up in its own browser window, just like Safari.

When you click save, you get a saved image of the whole page, top to bottom, including the parts of the page you can’t see in the browser window.

Similarly priced is BrowseBack.

This nifty Mac utility stores images of all the sites your browser visited recently.

A thumbnail history lets you go back to retrieve a page, even lets you search pages using keywords. Full sized pages are stored as PDFs which can be emailed.

BrowseBack’s browse thumbnails is a poor man’s iTunes’ Coverflow way of searching for web pages, highly effective and efficient, though with less eye candy.

If you need to archive web pages for research or presentations, these are a few of the Mac’s great utilities. All are a bit different, all do the job well. All are priced from nothing to next to nothing to ”Whoa! That much?”

What do you use to capture web pages? Why do you need to capture pages? What’s the best tool available for your needs and why?

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