How to Screenshot a Full Page in Chrome (3 Ways)

Updated July 2026 · 4 minute read

Pressing PrtScn or Cmd+Shift+4 only captures what fits on your screen. When you need the entire page, everything from the header to the footer of a long article, you need one of these three methods. All of them are free.

Method 1: Chrome's hidden DevTools command (no install)

Chrome can do this natively, but the feature is buried:

  1. Open the page you want to capture
  2. Press F12 (or Ctrl+Shift+I / Cmd+Option+I) to open DevTools
  3. Press Ctrl+Shift+P (or Cmd+Shift+P) to open the command menu
  4. Type full size and choose Capture full size screenshot

Chrome renders the entire page and saves a PNG to your downloads.

Good: built in, nothing to install, surprisingly reliable.

Bad: four keystrokes deep every single time, no JPEG or PDF option, no way to name the file first, and it fails on some pages with lazy-loaded images because Chrome renders them before they've loaded. There's also no way to do anything with the content afterward: if you captured the page to get at its text or a table, you're now retyping it by hand.

Method 2: the command line (for developers)

Headless Chrome can capture pages from a terminal:

chrome --headless --screenshot=page.png --window-size=1280,10000 https://example.com

Good: scriptable, great for automating captures of many URLs.

Bad: you have to guess the page height, logged-in pages don't work without session gymnastics, and it's obviously not a daily-use tool.

Method 3: a one-click extension

Extensions automate the scroll-capture-stitch cycle: click the toolbar icon, the page scrolls itself, and a finished image opens in a new tab. This is the method to pick if you capture pages more than occasionally, and it's the only method where the capture can be more than a picture.

Our extension SnapScope does free unlimited full-page captures (PNG, JPEG, clipboard), and adds something the other methods can't: AI that reads the capture. After capturing you can extract the full text of the page, get a summary, or pull every table into a CSV file, which turns a screenshot from a picture into something you can actually work with.

Good: one click, handles lazy-loading and sticky headers properly, names your files, exports PDF, and the AI extras when you need them.

Bad: like all screenshot tools, it can't capture Chrome's own settings pages or the Web Store, because Chrome blocks that for security.

Which should you use?