How to screenshot a scrolling panel inside a page
If a full-page capture finishes instantly and gives you a single screenful, the thing you wanted to capture is not the page — it is a box inside the page that scrolls by itself.
Why the normal capture stops after one tile
A scrolling capture works by scrolling the document and taking a picture after each step. Chat apps, admin dashboards, documentation sites with a fixed shell, and embedded document viewers do not scroll the document at all. The window stays exactly where it is and an inner container moves its own content. The capture scrolls the page, nothing moves, and it correctly concludes it has reached the bottom.
Capturing the inner container instead
ScrollStudio checks for this before it starts. It samples several points of the viewport, and if it finds a scrollable box that covers at least a quarter of the screen and has more content than it shows, it captures that box instead of the window and tells you so in the progress badge.
Two details matter for the result:
- Only the inside of the container is captured — its border and its scrollbar are excluded. If they were included, every tile would carry the same strip and the stitched image would show a line at every seam.
- Tiles are captured with a small overlap and joined in the middle of it, so the shading many containers draw at their top and bottom edge never lands in the finished image.
When it picks the wrong box
Pages with several scrollable areas can be ambiguous. Use Element capture and hover the panel you want — the highlight shows exactly what will be captured, and clicking it captures that element. For a panel that is taller than the screen, scroll it to the top first.
Things that will not work
- A list that loads more rows as you scroll and discards the rows above it (virtualised lists, as in some chat and table components) cannot be captured beyond what exists in the page at one time. Nothing outside the browser can recover rows the page has thrown away.
- Content inside a cross-origin iframe is not reachable by an extension content script.
- Chrome's own PDF viewer does not allow extension overlays at all. See capturing a PDF in a viewer.
Guides
- How to save a whole web page as an A4 PDF
- How to split a long screenshot into pages
- Why stitched screenshots have a line at the seam
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