The scrolling capture of SnagIt does capture the whole page and its replies.
To save as text you might try SingleFile, a Chrome extension.
Does snagit accurately capture the information though (you actually tried it on this page)? I know for shareX the scrolling captures are pretty bad. And some other things like “awesome fullpage screenshot” chrome addon or whatever its called timesout if its too long last time I used it
Single file, I tried, Idk what im doing but its not giving me anything
I’ll try snagit again sometime
Yup, SnagIt captured the whole page. Besides vertical scrolling the current version also has horizontal scrolling. Tremendously useful program.
Get familiar with SingleFile on another page:
- Navigate to a page
- Click SingleFile icon
- A bar appears at the top of the page with a “click to save”
- Click it. If nothing happens, click icon again and this time right-click the Click To Save
- A large HTML file is saved. It contains all HTML, images base64 encoded inside the document
Also confirmed to be working on this page. I use SingleFile with some regularity if I absolutely must have a copy of a page.
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wow i tried singlefile again, THIS IS PERFECT! thanks so much. I can just click one button to backup everything now
I always had issues with loss of formatting when backing things up (leading to having a harder time interpreting backup notes), now I can just load the html locally on my browser 
The file came out to a whopping 27 mB though (for this whole page), but its not that big of a deal
. Also I could print them out too, asides the fact the gifs aren’t moving, but still really neat
also this is nice, because now I can capture an entire screenshot of what my layouts look like while i modified them. NormallyI just took screenshots and had duplicated data in areas too
SingeFile saves the HTML and, if you enable it, some JavaScript as well.
The images are saved INSIDE the document. This trick is performed by taking the image and encoding it into a super long string of characters: base64 encoding. You can try this out for yourself: https://varvy.com/tools/base64/
This is what makes these files so large sometimes
You can verify/test what/how SingleFile saves a page by saving a copy, then disconnecting from the internet and loading the saved page.
Yes, you can save the embedded images: they behave the same way regular images do.
If you want to save a page including assests, and would want animated GIFs to stay animated, a better option is to save the page the normal way with your browser, opting for Save Complete Page.
If you prefer the 1 file format you can also save as MHTML. Chrome can show these as well but to save as MHTML you need a plugin like save as HTML
An MHTML file is essentially a ZIP file. It contains the HTML page and all the files linked in it.
Archive.org works the same way Google does: it crawls a website and saves a local copy of the page, uncompressed.
Scrapbook for Firefox is a similar extension but with a bit of database/search-like functionality added.
The Tagspaces Chrome extension does MHTML saving. It’s a companion for Tagspaces but works without it too.
Besides saving text of pages to Evernote or grabbing content otherwise (like with wget), SingleFile is the tool for me to capture a page as close to as it is.
Happy you like it!
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I just look at the URL of chrome, it shows up as a local address on my PC, no need to disconnect from internet 
ah okay, so if I save a MHTML file, there’s no encoding, and I can just unzip the file and would get image assets + HTML file?
what’s the advantages and disadvantages of this vs SingleFile? Save complete page… its only 231 kb vs 27,000 kb with singlefile
both show animated gifs… unless save complete page is not saving the image assets, and only the links to it?
I will turn off my internet to check on this
EDIT
I don’t see how chromes “Save complete page” is only 231 kb… when I have an image asset gif on the page that’s 250kb
Is chrome simply just referencing my “appdata\local” folder then for image assets? So its not a full complete backup, because if I sent that HTML file (the 231 kb) to another PC, my assumption is all the image links would be broken
No; think of it more as a different way of storing information so it becomes portable. Just imagine: you can take that whole string and save it in notepad.
Yes. When you save a Complete page in Chrome or IE or Edge, you get 1 HTML file + 1 folder which contains all the assets. Saving as MHTML just adds those 2 inside a zip file.
Used to be that MHTML was an Internet Explorer thing only. Now it’s supported pretty much everywhere so the difference isn’t that big.
I like the portability of SingleFile. It’s just a regular HTML file with images inside it instead of external. That means that any browser can work with it at any time.
E.g.: a saved SingleFile can be searched by anything while some tools don’t search inside an MHTML document.
Where does that other folder reside for the image assets? (via Save As Page for chrome)
Also, if you saved MHTML, since it zips up the file with image assets inside, would the HTML file be exactly the same for the HTML zip vs. the “Save As page” HTML from chrome?
They would be referencing the same images, but in different locations right?
In the same location as where you save the file:
Note that the file and the folder are linked: if you delete one, Windows will delete the other as well.
Essentially, yes.
Knowing a bit about your workflow and data ownership desires, I definitely recommend using SingleFile.
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okay thanks ruud
Also, I think I might use this to do offline viewing of notes on my android phone, when I might not have reliable internet.
i don’t know i missed that other folder when i saved page to desktop
Wow, you are a fountain of information and advice here
Curious - what is your work actually? Besides technical stuff, you seem to know a lot about visual design etc. also.
I hadn’t heard of ShareX before. But if someone can do with less advanced/detailed editing & annotation features then I recommend taking a look at Screenpresso, which I found a couple of weeks ago and am currently trying out.
If you use the screenshots mainly for documentation or for guidance, the “user manual generator” is a neat feature. Basically, the system makes it easy to preserve screenshots and not only edit and annotate them - but also keep a list of “bullet points” in text stored with them.
All of this can apparently be merged into documents as well (though I haven’t tried that yet).
This should make it easy to make AND UPDATE various user guides, SOPs etc…
I work in retail / fabrication / architecture, but I am learning webdevelopment on the side and have lots of hobby projects (that I sadly haven’t gotten around to yet finishing). I went to school originally for an engineering major I currently don’t use, but have decided to pour all my professional development into computer science instead. I’ve been really behind on my work, but starting today, my system is practically setup now, I just need to rebuild my habits and get used to it
Screenpresso has some functions that shareX doesn’t have, so I might check it out as a go-inbetween (the magnifier tool here. I was actually looking for something to do this, so I might check it out
I might check this out, unfortunately this is one big downside of shareX (which is why I keep text boxes short).
also sharex is free too, but cost is really a nonfactor though.
The issue is not being able to control where the images are stored though. It doesn’t look like screenpresso supports gifs only mp4. The vast majority of time I need gifs though
I have only used screenshots so far (my main need) but I read somewhere that recorded videos can be saved as GIF.
About storage, the share option can send it to the common cloud drives if you don’t want to keep it locally. (I just changed the local storage folder itself to be in my synced cloud folder).
Anyway, you probably have more requirements than me, but so far it seems like an easy tool that covers all the main bases for me without hassle.
I tried screenpresso and its actually really nice, I decided that I will try snagit, anything on alternativeto.net that recommends similar items (shutter shot, faststone capture)
Ran all the tests, techsmith snagit has the best image editing (masks) & the best capturing features (Scroll captures are superior) with a higher learning curve, shareX has the lightest UI / fastest to edit / low resource usage, screenpresso is a hybrid of both (low learning curve), march 29th 2017
Thanks for your detailed reply/replies. I don’t find them weird, as you suggested they would be In fact, many of your posts are really valuable. Just today I reread some of your setup posts.
Every share option you see in Snagit is, essentially, a plugin driving that option. So adding the imgur plugin does basically the same thing.
You can easily make presets and assign them hotkeys. Tip: even when you do not want to preview an image in the editor, the editor will open up until you disable “leave editor running in the background”.
I always have 3 presets: print screen (just to clipboard for pasting), ctrl print screen (open in editor), alt print screen (save to file).
Wonderful tool.
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I always try to post whats in my head every few days somewhere, and it helps that its on a forum (and not on a wordpress blog , etc).
also I wrote out what my colorschemas are for notes as well (since I just finished writing this up too). CTRL+SHIFT+1,5,6 are all mapped to hotkeys “@! , @? , @zz” respectively, and activates the hotkeys. I picked. @zz stands for waiting on because I’m getting tired of waiting on someone else (ZZZZ sleeping), @! is something important to do or ongoing task, @? means I have a question with no answer and I need to go find one before assigning a physical task (its a research task basically). I have all of those colors in a search parameter that I occasionally look through and used the unique URL string into tabsnooze for chrome (global search on all my notes in document)
color:red OR color:purple OR color:blue
Last time I used it was like 3 years ago, and they massively made lots of great changes to the platform.
I didn’t give snagit enough time though, I only tried it out for 30 minutes (all I did was press a bunch of buttons at random basically). All software tends to behave the same on a UX level, and if you know how to use Adobe Illustrator + sharex, snagit should be fairly intuitive, but I realize that snagit has a higher learning curve
As for SingleFile, make sure you’ve scroll through the whole page so that everything has been loaded in the window.
hm I did do this, but for some reason, I cannot capture sub-reply items.
Right now I decided to just manually dump everything in a word doc folder for those replies that didn’t get copied, along with the SingleFile’s file, into a dated folder for reference
At some point in this thread you commented about keeping track of open tabs and so on.
It’s been a big problem for me as well. Clogging up the system and so on. Not to mention, some accidental closes or crashes that lost me an s-load of open tabs with open tasks.
Especially when I search/research a lot, I use many tabs.
You mentioned a few tab management tools. I don’t think you mentioned Tabs Outliner. I have tried several, and I have found this to be far beyond anything else.
It’s like a swiss knife that can do many things (hence, a little bit of a learning curve at first) - but now can’t think of not using it.
It is so easy to have a large hierarchy open, then close it when you leave it, and bring it out again whenever.
Also, the tool can be used not only for “archiving” but also as a replacement for your general bookmark manager if you want. As in, keeping lists of tabs you use regularly.
Highly recommended.
Anyway, just throwing it in there since I can see you love tools for every part of your workflow.
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I have tried this, this application originally stemmed from Firefox’s vertical tree tabs. Chrome never implemented anything like this, I also did spend a lot of time researching this tool in the past, since it was really the only thing chrome had going for it.
I ended up scrapping it since I need valuable real estate on my screen, and this was just another thing I have to look at.
What your describing is basically an approach to WATERFALL PROJECT MANAGEMENT vs. AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
I tend to be really freeflow with my tabs, I drag things around, order them, tab bookmarks at random , close and open, etc. I log important bookmarks in my daily bullet journal instead in dynalist if I’m researching something I don’t know, this style is more AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
I will give this a shot, but I really like my chrome bookmark since i can see it all the time.