Why Your Full-Page Screenshot Is Cut Off at the Bottom

You capture a long page, the image looks right, and then you scroll to the end of it and the page just stops. No error, no warning. The last third is simply not there.

The frustrating part is that the same page, captured on a different computer, comes out complete. That is the clue, and it points straight at the cause.

First, rule out the ordinary explanations

Before the interesting reason, two boring ones worth eliminating:

• The page grew while it was being captured. Content that loads as you scroll means the page is taller at the end of the capture than it was at the start. The tool measured once, at the beginning.
• The page scrolls inside a panel, not the window. Some layouts put the scrollbar on an inner container. Scrolling the window does nothing, so the capture gets one screen and stops.

If neither of those fits, and especially if the cut happens at the same place every time, it is the height ceiling.

The ceiling is counted in device pixels

A full-page screenshot is not one photograph. The tool scrolls the page a screen at a time, captures each screen, and stitches the pieces onto one very tall canvas. That canvas cannot be infinitely tall — browsers impose a limit, so any tool doing this has to pick a ceiling and stop there.

Here is the part that surprises people. The ceiling is measured in device pixels, not in the pixels the page is laid out in.

On an ordinary monitor those are the same thing. On a high-resolution display they are not: the screen draws two device pixels for every one the page is designed in, so everything looks sharper. The image is twice as detailed, which also means it is twice as large in the only unit the ceiling cares about.

So the same web page, with the same amount of content in it, hits the ceiling at half the height on a sharp screen.

This is why the problem looks random. The person on a desktop monitor captures the page and it works. The person on a laptop with a high-resolution screen captures the identical page and loses the bottom. Nothing about the page changed. The screen did.

What you can do about it

In rough order of how well they work:

1. Zoom the page out before capturing. Ctrl or Cmd with the minus key, down to 80% or 67%, then capture. The page becomes genuinely shorter, so there is less of it to fit. This is the fix most people never think of and it solves a lot of cases.
2. Capture it in two or three parts. Scroll to the halfway point, capture what is on screen, then continue. Less tidy, nothing missing.
3. Print the page to PDF. Ctrl or Cmd and P, then choose Save as PDF. The layout will reflow and often looks different from the page, but for long text documents it is reliable and has no height limit.
4. Use a lower-resolution screen if you have one. Impractical for most people, but if you have an external monitor plugged in, dragging the window onto it genuinely changes the outcome.

What PageStill does

Our ceiling is 32,000 device pixels, which is 16,000 page pixels on a 2× display. Most pages are nowhere near it. Some are.

The thing we changed is when you find out. PageStill measures the page before it starts capturing, so on a page that will not fit it asks first, instead of handing you a truncated image and mentioning it afterwards. You get the choice:

• The whole page, slightly softer. If it would fit at ordinary sharpness, we stitch it at that scale. Text stays easy to read.
• The whole page, in pieces. If it will not fit either way, it saves as several images with nothing missing between them.

Saving in pieces as PNGs is part of the free side, deliberately. A very long page is exactly where you would most resent being asked for money, so the rescue is not the paid path. Pieces come out as separate images rather than one marked-up file, because the editor is built around a single image.

Pages that fit never see any of this. Most pages fit.