Why Images Are Blank or Grey in Your Screenshot

You capture a long page and half the photographs are grey rectangles. Some have a faint outline where the picture should be. A few loaded, and they are the ones near the top.

The images are not missing from the page. They were not there yet when the picture was taken.

What is actually happening

Almost every modern site loads images late on purpose. Rather than fetching two hundred photographs the moment you arrive, the page fetches the handful you can actually see and waits. As you scroll toward the rest, each one is requested, arrives a moment later, and fades in.

This is good for the reader. A page that loaded everything up front would be slow to open and would spend data on pictures nobody scrolls to.

It is bad for a capture, because a full-page screenshot works by scrolling the page itself — down one screen, photograph, down another, photograph — and then stitching the pieces together. If the capture scrolls faster than the network can answer, it photographs the placeholder rather than the image.

How to recognize it

The tell is position. The images that made it are at the top of the page, where you had already been sitting before you started. The blanks begin at roughly the point where the capture overtook the loading, and everything below that is empty.

If the missing images are scattered at random rather than clustered below a line, something else is going on — usually images that have genuinely failed on the site, or that come from a source the page could not reach.

What you can do about it

1. Scroll the whole page yourself first, slowly, then go back to the top. Once an image has loaded it stays loaded. This is the fix that always works, and on a very long page it is tedious enough that people look for another one.
2. Press End, wait, then press Home. A faster version of the same idea. It works on pages that load in large blocks rather than image by image, and it fails on pages that only load what passes through the window.
3. Use a faster connection. Unsatisfying advice, but the race is between the capture and the network, and this is one of the two things in it you can change.
4. Slow the capture down. The other thing you can change. Any tool that pauses after each scroll gives the images time to arrive.

Why printing to PDF does not rescue you

Saving the page as a PDF is the usual fallback for a difficult capture, and for this problem it behaves the same way. Print rendering asks the page for its full height at once, and images that have not been requested yet are still not requested. You get the same grey boxes in a different file format.

Scrolling the page first fixes the PDF too, for the same reason it fixes the screenshot. There is more on the two different things people mean by this in how to save a screenshot as a PDF in Chrome.

What PageStill does

It waits after each scroll before taking the shot, rather than moving and photographing in one motion. That pause is what gives a lazily loaded image time to arrive, and it is the difference between a page of grey boxes and a page of pictures.

On a slow connection a pause is not always enough, and a very heavy page can still outrun it. Scrolling through once yourself beforehand remains the reliable move on anything unusually long or image-dense.