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I need to take a screenshot of a website as it would appear on a very high resolution monitor... say 4000x3000 pixels. My laptop's screen has a native resolution of 1400x768. Basically, I need to simulate having a monitor resolution much higher than my monitor and video card actually supports. I want the screenshot of the site to look pretty much how it does when you hit CTRL MINUS (zoom out) in Firefox repeatedly, but without any loss of pixels due to scaling. How can I do this? Is there some way to use virtual machine software to simulate a super-high-res display? If not, is there some way to open a browser window bigger than the screen, and then capture its contents as a PNG somehow? Anything else that might work?

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  • You might try to switch the dpi setting of your OS. I believe in windows 8 it requires changing a registry value. While this gives you a giant desktop, the fonts of course also scale so you have to strain your eyes more to read text.
    – jiggunjer
    May 17, 2015 at 18:21

9 Answers 9

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You can do it with Firefox and 2 extensions: Web Developer and FireShot.

Once both extensions are installed, go to Tools - Web Developer - Resize - Edit Resize Dimensions... .

Add a new size, 4000 x 3000. check "Resize the viewport" if you want only the page content to be 4000x3000. If you don't check it, the complete window of Firefox (with toolbars, menu, ...) will be set to this dimension.

alt text

Once at the correct size, go to Tools - FireShot - Capture Entire Page and ... . Select an action, like Save for instance. It will save the page content that has been set by Web Developer to the desired size.

alt text

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  • @snark - Well, that almost worked. But it seems that the Web Developer extension won't let me make the viewport bigger than my screen...? Mar 16, 2010 at 15:27
  • @Joshua : it works fine for me. I tested before posting my answer. I made a new test but couldn't find where to host such a big image
    – Snark
    Mar 16, 2010 at 15:36
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    Update: The can't-make-a-window-bigger-than-the-screen problem appears to be a limitation imposed by the Windows OS itself. Mar 16, 2010 at 15:37
  • @snark - Do you mind if I ask what OS you're running? Mar 16, 2010 at 15:38
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    @snark - Ah. Maybe it's a Windows XP thing (that's what I'm stuck with here). In any case, I can work around it by using FireBug to insert a DIV with style="width: 4000px; height: 3000px;" into the HTML code, and then using FireShot, so I'm still good. Thanks for pointing out FireShot. That makes me life a lot easier. I had been scrolling around and taking screenshots than compositing them manually before. It was a MAJOR PAIN. Mar 16, 2010 at 15:50
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Meanwhile (for at least a year or two -- since version 15, if I am not mistaken), Firefox supports this directly via the integrated developer tools.

Either hit CtrlShift M or select Responsive Design View from the Developer Tools icon in the stripe menu.

That will bring up this view, which will let you choose from a set of presets as well as enter any desired resolution and directly save a screenshot in PNG format to disk with one click:

enter image description here

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    The screenshot button may not work properly when you're simulating hi-dpi images by zooming in. In that case, open the developer toolbar Shift + F2 and paste screenshot --clipboard --fullpage into the "console". This is different than the regular JS console.
    – blade
    Sep 17, 2016 at 16:23
  • This also works with the chrome developer console device testing mode. The screenshot option is in the drop down menu in the top right.
    – Tully
    Aug 25, 2017 at 18:45
  • Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work in Chrome; I just tried to take a full-viewport screenshot in Chrome of a Microsoft Flow (since the Flow won't display properly in Firefox, even though Firefox' full-viewport screenshot method works) and it only took a screenshot of the currently viewed space... in other words, there was no difference between Chrome's "capture screenshot" and "capture full-size screenshot" options... bummer.
    – TylerH
    Jul 11, 2018 at 15:38
  • @blade Which other console are you talking about?
    – posfan12
    Jul 4, 2021 at 7:30
  • Never mind. You are supposed to precede commands with a colon e.g. :screenshot --clipboard --fullpage and paste it into the JS console. Except, the result I get is the same DPI as the normal screenshot. It is ignoring my zoom level!
    – posfan12
    Jul 4, 2021 at 7:38
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On a Mac, Paparazzi can help, either using its GUI or using a URL syntax like:

paparazzi:(width=4000,height=3000,maxheight=3000)How can I take browser screenshots at a higher resolution than my browser supports?

enter image description here

The URL syntax can easily be turned into a bookmarklet. Paparazzi uses the WebKit rendering engine.

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I use a FireFox add on called Abduction to create a .png shot of a webpage in its entirety. Unfortunately that add on hasn't been updated to be compatible with FireFox 3.6 yet.

Looks like ScreenGrab will do the same thing.

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Firefox 16 onwards now contains the ability to control the size of the viewport with the developer console:

Open up Tools ... Web Developer ... Developer Toolbar

Resize viewport with this command:

resize to 5000 5000

Screen capture with this command:

screenshot output.png
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Well, with a Linux (or X Window System setup of any flavor) you can set a virtual desktop that is larger than your monitor. You scroll around in it, but I would think you could then maximize your browser and screen shot it.

I don't know if there is a way to do it in Windows or OS X.

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I find using online services like thumbalizr easier than installing browser plugins, if you don't need to do this often.

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In Chrome there are severals extensions such as:

There's another Webpage screenshot but I don't have reputation enough to publish more than two links

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If you simply want to take a screenshot at a higher resolution in Firefox, you can also do this via the console:

:screenshot --dpr 4 will create a screenshot with 4 times your current resolution (dpr stands for device-pixel-ratio). The full documentation of the other options available is here.

Note that a larger screen (or viewport, more precisely) may still yield a different result, if the web site reacts to the size or pixel density, through CSS or Javascript.

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