How to use OpenFullPage. All twenty tools, one page.

Your first capture

The four ways to capture

A plain click does whichever one you set as your default, which starts as the full page. The other three are switched on in settings, because a toolbar that offers four buttons to someone who only ever wants one is a worse toolbar.

All four shortcuts can be remapped at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Hiding a button in settings never disables its shortcut.

The editor

The capture opens in an ordinary tab with a real editor around it. The important thing to know is that every mark stays an object. Draw an arrow now, change your mind ten minutes later, click it and restyle it. Nothing is painted permanently into the picture until you export.

Drawing

Pick a tool, then drag on the image. When you finish a shape it is selected and the tool returns to Select, so the next click moves what you just drew rather than starting another one. Hold Shift while drawing for perfect squares, circles and 45 degree lines.

There are fifteen shapes, grouped behind one chevron: arrows, lines and a freehand pen; boxes, rounded boxes, stadiums, ellipses, callouts, a loupe and a highlighter; and five flowchart shapes. Text captions and numbered steps have their own buttons, and each has a chevron beside it. The one by the numbered step sets its size, with a slider or an exact number of pixels, for the steps you have selected and the next one you place. An eraser removes whole marks you drag over.

Selecting and changing things

• Click a shape to select it. The one under your pointer is outlined, and the cursor tells you whether a click would move it or resize it.
• Drag to move, or drag one of the handles to resize. Alt and drag makes a duplicate.
• Arrow keys nudge by a pixel, or ten with Shift. Holding a key counts as one undo step, not fifty.
• Shift click adds to the selection, or sweep a marquee over empty canvas. Ctrl A selects everything.
• Right click a shape for Bring to front, Send to back and the two single steps between. [ and ] do the same from the keyboard.
• Backspace deletes the selection, Esc cancels a drag or drops the selection.

Style

Border and fill are separate controls, each with quick colours, a larger grid, your system colour picker and a hex field, and each carries its own opacity. Stroke offers five weights plus an exact pixel value, solid, dashed or dotted, and arrowheads on either end, both or neither.

Text is multi line, with a family, a size in points, bold, italic, underline and four alignments, all stored on the shape so a caption written earlier can be restyled later. Double click a caption to change its words, and drag a side handle to set the width it wraps at. The Frame block puts a border and a plate behind a caption, which is what makes a label readable over a busy screenshot.

Redacting

Press P and drag over anything you would rather not publish. The tool resamples the pixels underneath and paints the result back over them, and the export is flattened, so the saved file has no original hiding underneath. This is the part most blur tools get wrong: a blur laid over a layered document is usually recoverable.

The loupe magnifies a redacted copy of the capture rather than the original, so magnifying part of a redacted region shows the redaction larger and never the pixels beneath it. Check what you redacted before you send it: the tool removes exactly the region you dragged over and nothing else.

Cropping

Press C and drag. Cropping proposes a region rather than cutting immediately: the surround dims, the region has eight handles and can be slid around whole, and a tick and a cross confirm or abandon it. Enter and Esc do the same. The confirm bar is fixed to the window, so it stays reachable on a capture ten screens tall.

A crop is undoable like anything else, because the original capture is kept untouched underneath and every edit is re-rendered from it.

Saving and sharing

• PNG is lossless and the default. The largest file, and the right one for text.
• JPEG is smaller with a little loss. The Quality slider moves it, and you watch the size change as you drag.
• WebP is usually the smallest at the same quality, and every current browser reads it.
• PDF is lossless. A long capture becomes several pages at the capture's own width, with no scaling and no margins.

The filename is built from the page address and the date, and you can edit it before saving. Ctrl C copies the image to the clipboard instead. Chrome asks for permission to write to your downloads folder the first time you save, not at install, and declining leaves everything else working.

The Upload button is a hand off rather than an upload: it copies the image and opens an image host in a new tab so you can paste it there yourself. The extension performs no upload and has no way to.

Editing an image you already have

The editor is not only for new captures. Open the result tab with no capture in it, or use the open button, and you can bring in an image from a file picker, a drag and drop, or a paste from your clipboard, then annotate, redact, crop and export it exactly as if the extension had photographed it.

Settings and the toolbar

Right click the toolbar icon and choose Options, or use the gear in the editor. Everything is stored locally, and you can export your settings to a file and import them back, which is the deliberate replacement for the synced storage this extension does not use.

Every keyboard shortcut

On a Mac, use Cmd wherever this table says Ctrl.

When a page fights back

Nothing happens on a Chrome page

Chrome forbids every extension from touching chrome:// pages, the Web Store, the PDF viewer, other extensions' pages and the new tab page. Nothing can change that. OpenFullPage says so plainly instead of failing quietly, and opens its editor so you can at least bring in an image of your own.

The image came back scaled down, or cut short

Chrome's canvas has a hard ceiling of 16,384 pixels on a side. Longer pages are scaled down to fit rather than cut off, and the editor tells you what scale was used. That limit is in device pixels, so a high resolution display reaches it at half the page length. Past roughly half of normal resolution there is nothing left to give and the capture is truncated, which the editor also says.

The page never finished loading

Every step that reaches into a page has a deadline, so a page that never settles cannot hang the capture. Press Finish now in the progress panel to stop where it has reached and keep what it has. The result says it ended early rather than pretending the image is complete.

An embedded frame is cut off

Frames from the same site are expanded to their full height and captured entirely. A frame from a different site cannot have its height read from the page holding it, so only its visible box is captured. Turning on Advanced access in settings closes that gap, at the cost of broad permissions, and it is off by default for that reason.

The page scrolls inside a panel rather than the window

Applications that scroll inside an inner container rather than the window are not supported yet. Pick an element is usually the way through: point at the panel itself and capture that.

The result tab lost my capture

The screenfuls are streamed to the tab once and then forgotten by the extension, so refreshing that tab discards the capture. The tab warns before it lets that happen. Save or copy first.

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