Capture website

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.