Capture, edit and share webpage screenshots with qSnap

Taking a screenshot of what you can see on a computer is easy. Capturing something larger than the screen -- in particular, a lengthy web page -- is much more of a challenge, and even specialist screen capture tools won't necessarily do it.

QSnap is a free service and set of browser add-ons which helps you capture web pages, no matter what size they are, and can edit and share them, too.

The package has extensions for each of the main browsers -- Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera – and it’s very easy to use. Typically you'll click a button on your browser toolbar, choose whether qSnap should capture the complete page or just the visible area, then wait a few seconds as the program takes its screenshot.

Your grab is displayed in a capable vector editor, where you can annotate it with rectangles, ellipses, arrows, callouts, freehand lines and more. This has a few small shortcomings -- your callout text can’t be a different color to its border, for instance -- but it’s still far better than we expected.

The developer also understands that you may want to share several pages at once, and so a "Capture new" option allows you to browse to another page, grab and annotate that in the same way.

Repeat this process as necessary, and you’re able to save one or all of the screens locally, leaving you with a set of JPEGs in your Downloads folder. Text didn't look great in our initial tests, but that’s because the default JPEG quality is only "Medium" -- you can ramp this up if necessary, or export PNGs instead.

Sign up for a free qSnap account and you can also save your grabs to an online "folder", and get an instant link for sharing them with others. (If you don’t want to give your email address away to yet another company, it's not compulsory -- you’re able to save files locally without having a qSnap account.)

This kind of full page capture approach won’t deliver good results everywhere. If a page responds to scrolling by extending a sidebar of ads, say, or generating some repeating navigation elements, then the final images might look a little strange.

QSnap does a great job of capturing compatible sites, though, and its wide browser support, capable editor and ability to combine multiple pages help it stand out from the competition.