Interrupt19

Photo courtesy of Derailer.org

With so much information on the internet, there has to be a good way to save and archive some of it. Bookmarks are alright but you have to be online for them and what happens when the site isn’t there anymore? You can print them but have you ever tried to print a web page and it looks nothing like what was on the screen? Saving the pages just results in a file plus a folder and it still doesn’t look the same. With many pages saved, it can get confusing as well. For the past year or so, I found a quick and simple solution to this that I’m going to share with you.

Downloading web pages with Paparazzi:

With the free to download (donation requested) Paparazzi, you can archive pages exactly as they look on the screen. The magic of this program is that it taps into the Safari browsing engine within OS X and converts what is on screen into an image. The resulting .png file then can be opened in preview, looking exactly like what you see onscreen. All in one easy to archive file.

Here’s how to do it, step by step:

1. Download Paparazzi and install.

2. Go to a web page that you’d like to archive.

3. Highlight the URL (webpage address).

4. Copy the URL.

5. Open Paparazzi and paste the URL into the address bar.

6. Press the Capture! button and it will create the page.

7. Click the “Save Image As…” button at the bottom to save.

8. You may rename the page and set the format (JPEG, PNG, PDF or TIFF).

9. Click “Save” and its done.

Note: You may want to rename the page for these reasons.
- The title will be the same as the page title at the top of Safari/Firefox. It may be too long to be usable or not descriptive enough.

- The title may contain special characters (&, #, %, @, etc) that could cause problems later on.

- To make sense in an archive situation. I like to save mine with the Website name first and then the title/description of the page).

When you want to read your saved page, double click on it and it will open in Preview. Zoom in if necessary and read away.

Note: Some of these pages (especially blog entries) can get quite large. You may want to Crop out the comments at the end of the entry to save space.