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For my high school graduation, I'd like to make a video telling the story of my class via flying through our Facebook group's posts and highlighting a few of the most important ones.

To do this, I wanted to use one of the many browser extensions that take a screenshot of a website, but all of them either just bug out, or say there's not enough video memory (FireShot), even with only the past 3 months' posts. That's not a huge surprise though, the group has thousands of posts, and if we say a post takes up around 400px, that means the end images would be maybe 10,000,000px large in total.

I then tried to print the page to a PDF, but I just couldn't find a way to get rid of the page breaks—the end result should have no seams at all.

Currently I'm thinking of just getting all data via Facebook's API and writing a program that generates an image from that, resembling Facebook's design. But I thought it'd be wise to ask for alternatives before I resort to that.

(And yes, of course this video could be done with just a tiny bit of visual trickery, with motion blur and stuff, but I just love fidelity even when it's behind the scenes, and I found this problem generally intriguing.)

Edit: Here's a demo of what I'm trying to do. This is only 16k pixels though.

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  • You'll fare no better on displaying your mega image than in creating it. And forget .jpg, it's got a 64k limit. In theory .png can handle it but you're looking at something in the 10gigapixel range. Dec 10, 2013 at 22:39
  • You might want to try Greenshot. Although what you describe is only supported with Internet Explorer as far as I know. Dec 10, 2013 at 22:42
  • I was hoping I would just figure that part out later on. I'd imagine it wouldn't be that difficult to write a script that splits the image up into smaller reasonably-sized parts, which I can just stitch together in After Effects later.
    – Underyx
    Dec 10, 2013 at 22:44
  • @OliverSalzburg Thanks! With that, I've successfully generated a 32k pixel high test image. I'm a bit scared though, cause at that point, IE was already starting to get very laggy. The top sticky blue bar on facebook was present every thousand or so pixels on the final image, but I managed to hide it by going into IE's accessibility settings, and loading up a custom CSS file with #pagelet_bluebar {display: none; } in it. Also, @LorenPechtel, I was very pleasantly surprised that Windows Image Viewer had no problem at all reading this image file, which by the way is only 9 MB.
    – Underyx
    Dec 10, 2013 at 23:26
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    Instead of extracting a very large image, why not extract several fragments, and subsequently join them together in the video, using a tool like ffmpeg? This seems more feasible. Dec 10, 2013 at 23:47

2 Answers 2

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Have you tried the built in, firefox console screenshot tool? If firefox will render it, you should be able to screenshot it. In firefox hit shift -f2 and then type in screenshot --fullpage bigpicture.png

Alternately you can capture just what's on the screen without the --fullpage and scroll for the next page and use a image editor to join them together as needed

I don't have an insanely long page to test it on, but I suppose it should work.

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  • Whoa, I never even knew this existed, thanks a lot, I'll give this a try tomorrow!
    – Underyx
    Dec 11, 2013 at 4:00
  • Awesome, very handy tool! +1
    – Andreas
    Jan 8, 2014 at 12:32
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Depending on what you mean by "flying through", Jing sounds like it would work quite well for your situation. It has a simple user interface for recording video screencasts. If you store the file locally (as opposed to being hosted on the internet or a network drive), there should be no lag viewing the finished video product. It's free to try out and see if it fits the bill. I've used it for 5-10 minute clips, and while it might bog down a bit when creating, it's great for recording and later viewing what's on your screen.

I would suggest going to each of the posts first, in the order you want them to display, so that images are cached and pageloads are faster. This way you can also easily tour through things just by backing up to the beginning and hitting the forward button of your browser.

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  • Sorry, that won't quite cut it, here's what I am trying to do, but with around 30 times the length.
    – Underyx
    Dec 11, 2013 at 4:01
  • I did add that first qualifier for a reason, as I thought you might be alluding to something like this. Cool idea BTW. If you can find a way to create the effect, the screencast might still have value for playback, rather than individual images bogging you down.
    – Dallas
    Dec 11, 2013 at 4:08

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