Snap, Capture, Collect, And Share Web Pages

Early this week I needed to capture some web pages and send to clients. Easy, right? The easiest way to save a web page in Safari is as a web archive. That way you get the whole web page saved. Perfect, right?

Except the client was using Windows and Internet Explorer, not Safari. Uh oh. How about screen capture? Sure, that works, but only captures a part of the web page visible on the screen. So, I looked around for a utility to do what I need—whole web page capture—and found an expensive solution. It’s perfect. Except for the expensive part.

Safari’s built-in web archive is handy. With a click you can capture an entire web page, fully formatted, all the graphics and links, and displayed perfectly. In Safari. Not Firefox. Not IE. This is good for sending archived web pages to Mac users. For everyone else, not so much.

So, I checked around and found a few utilities that do just that. Grab and store web pages. One of the niftiest and least expensive is WebSnapper from TastyApps. Drag in a web page URL, and WebSnapper captures the whole page, even parts you can’t see on your Mac’s screen without scrolling.

Once saved, the graphic image can be emailed or uploaded wherever as an image file or PDF. No more cut and paste. No more clip and scroll. Just drag and drop and save. Not bad for a mere $15, and it works almost as advertised.

Almost? Yeah, there’s that pesky upgrade that Apple calls Snow Leopard, which brought along Safari 4, and a few incompatibilities here and there. WebSnapper works fine. The Safari plugin, not so much.

Without digging into all the gory geeky details, the plugin requires a workaround to work, though, again, WebSnapper’s window application works.

No longer in a bind to snap, save and send web pages to my client, I decided to look around to see what else was available. It turns out that the Mac has twenty eleven screen capture utilities, but my needs are more specific.

I need just the web page, the whole web page, and nothing but the web page. My Mac360 cohort, The Queen of Mac Cheap™, The Value Vixen, Alexis said to try LittleSnapper.

Was I ever in for a surprise. LittleSnapper is like the ultra big brother of WebSnapper, a standalone Mac application which does more than I expected, more than I needed, and at a surprising price tag.

Alexis, if you don’t know already, specializes in Cheap Mac goods. As in low price. More often, as in no price at all. Why would she recommend LittleSnapper over a less expensive alternative? The mommy stress must be getting to her.

Or, maybe there are not any competitive alternatives to Little Snapper. After a few hours of use, I’m willing to admit that her recommendation was based less on stress and more on the test. LittleSnapper is good.

Did I mention that LittleSnapper is like the giant big brother of WebSnapper? What it does to capture web sites in all their full, lengthy and graphic glory, is nothing short of spectacular (which it needs to be because that’s what the price is).

LittleSnapper has a built-in web browser. Enter the URL and the web page loads just like it would look in Apple’s Safari (which, by the way, renders web pages better than any browser, Mac or Windows). One click and the whole web page—top to bottom—gets saved.

From there it’s easy to share, easy to organize, and—drum roll, please—easy to edit. Edit? Yes, LittleSnapper has a bunch of handy vector-based annotation tools so you can mark up the web page just like your high school English teacher marked up your book reports. Only digitally.

The annotations are non-destructive, gone in a click, back in a click. You can also snap and save specific portions of web pages. Oh, did I mention that LittleSnapper also snaps your Mac’s web pages? Why not? It’s so easy that twenty eleven other utilities do it, too.

Sharing the images, whether of web pages, parts of web pages, or parts of your Mac’s screen, is easy enough. Email is your friend, of course, but LittleSnapper comes with built-in ability to export images, FTP or sFTP images, use the design sharing service Ember, even upload to Flickr.

What’s the price of easy, elegant and powerful snap, capture, collect, and share? It’s a whopper, relative to the keyboard screen shots your Mac gives you for free. Taking a cue from Apple’s boxed sets, a five user pack is much less expensive.

Just as handy is the complementary LittleSnapper for iPhone, because who doesn’t need a screen capture utility while driving and texting along America’s highways and byways.