Capture site

What it is for

Getting a web page out of the browser and into something you can put in a deck, a feed or a case study. Not a screenshot of your desktop with a browser window in it — the page itself, at whatever size and shape you need, with nothing around it.

Aspects loads the URL in a real WebKit view, which is the same engine Safari uses. That matters more than it sounds: anything you can reach in a browser you can capture. A page behind a login, a staging URL, a localhost port, a design that only exists on your machine.

Three modes, for three different jobs

Snap

A single still, at a chosen scroll position. Press return and you have a PNG or JPEG. This is the mode for a hero image, an app-store screenshot, or the top of a page at a specific width.

Record

Captures the live view while you scroll and interact, and gives you an MP4 when you stop. Use it when the thing worth showing is a behaviour — a menu opening, a form filling in, a hover state — because those need a hand on them.

Record is not deterministic, and that is inherent rather than a shortcoming: it is capturing what happened, and what happened depends on when you moved.

Scroll

A scroll built from motion steps — go to this position, over this long, with this easing — rendered frame by frame into an MP4. No hands, no timing, no dropped frames. This is the mode for a feed.

Why the scroll output is identical every time

A screen recorder samples whatever the display showed, at whatever rate the machine managed. Record the same scroll twice and you get two different files.

Scroll mode does not sample. Frame N is computed from the scroll position at frame N, with no reference to the wall clock at all. The same artboard produces the same bytes on a laptop on battery and a Mac Studio, today and next month.

Which means you can re-export at a different ratio, or after fixing a typo on the page, and get back exactly what you had — minus the typo.

Set the shape before the motion

The output ratio decides the composition, so choose it first. A desktop layout inside a 9:16 frame is mostly empty margin. If the output is for a phone, narrow the render viewport too and let the site's own breakpoints do the work — you are capturing the mobile design rather than shrinking the desktop one.

What you get

• PNG or JPEG for a still, including a progressive JPEG if you want one
• H.264 MP4 for Record and Scroll
• Any output ratio, with the render viewport set independently
• An optional cursor composited into exports — hidden, a dot, or the real macOS pointer

One honest limitation

A page that refuses to load in an embedded view will refuse here too, and some sites detect and block automation. There is no way around that from inside a WebKit view, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon. If a page loads in Safari it will load here; if it does not, it will not.