Use Firefox to automate hundreds of screen captures

Screen capture (noun or verb) To create an image of what’s on your computer screen. Synonyms: screengrab, screenshot.

Scroll down and you’ll see this post contains several screenshots. You can see the value of capturing an image from a computer screen. It’s easy to do with available software or keyboard shortcuts; simply choose a screen, activate, and save the image file. It’s not too time-consuming to create one or two.

But why would anyone have a need to create tens or hundreds of screenshots at once?

• You’re preparing a libel suit against your former business partner who defamed you on Twitter. You need to document all 48 false and malicious tweets she wrote about you, in case she deletes them.
• Your grandmother, who doesn’t have the internet, wants you to print out all 47 of Rachael Ray’s online pizza recipes.
• You’re moving to a remote island, and want to bring ALL the LOLcat photos with you.

It’s not a common need, but after I learned how to automate this process, rather than painstakingly seeking out every webpage, and repetitively activating a screen capture, I started using it regularly. Most recently, I entered a video contest, and wanted to periodically document video views received by 14 of my competitors, so I could track them over time. This technique let me click a few buttons, and voila! Images I could reference later.

Let’s use the ridiculous Rachael Ray pizza recipe example to walk you through the steps.

What you’ll need:

• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• An e-mail address
• Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet software
• An intermediate level of computer skill

Preparing a list of pages to capture

1) If you already know exactly which webpages you want to capture, simply create a plain text file with every URL on a new line and save it. (Skip to step 7 if your list is ready.). Example:

http://www.rachaelray.com/recipe.php?recipe_id=35
http://www.rachaelray.com/recipe.php?recipe_id=107
http://www.rachaelray.com/recipe.php?recipe_id=134

2) But because there are 47 pizza recipes by Rachel Ray, let’s automate that mind-numbing process too. Download and install a Firefox extension called “SEO for Firefox.” It offers a bunch of tools us nerds find interesting, but there’s one that’s important right now: It lets you output a list of Google search results into Excel. (You may need to restart Firefox to activate it.)

3) We want to create a very specific Google search to narrow down results to exactly what we’re looking for. This requires a bit of search literacy. I’ll search <site:rachaelray.com/recipe.php pizza>. Google’s <site:> syntax lets you search only on a domain you specify - in this case, Rachael Ray’s site. I also know that every recipe starts with /recipe.php, and the keyword pizza will find every recipe on her site that mentions pizza. (I get 1,930 results, but Google sorts by relevance, keeping the 47 recipes with Pizza in the title up front.)

4) Because you’ve installed the SEO for Firefox extension, now after you search, you can click the CSV link under your search box. This will let you save a “comma-separated value” file, which you can open in Excel. This will create a list of URLs - one for every Google result on the first page. (You can create separate CSV files for every page, but it’s easiest to change your Google search settings to max out at 100 results per page.)

5) Open the CSV file(s) in Excel. You’ll notice some extra junk worth deleting. Specifically, all of my URLs are appended with ,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”,”?”, Use the Find/Replace function to replace this exact string of characters with nothing. You can also replace www with http://www to ensure that they’re recognized as URLs. (I also deleted the first line, because it’s not a URL, and I deleted everything after the 47th URL, because I know the rest aren’t pizza recipes.)

6) Now we have a clean list of URLs. Select them all and copy them. Paste them into Notepad or TextEdit. (In TextEdit, convert to plain text.) Save this file.

Now for the automatic screen grabbing!

7) Download and install “Grab Them All,” another extension for Firefox. (You may need to restart Firefox.) Go to Tools > Grab Them All. Load the text file you created, and tell the program where to save your images. Click Let’s Go! and it does the rest.

8) After it finishes, you have a directory with one jpeg image per URL listed! It even scrolls the length of the page, to capture all of the content.

Posted in Measurement, Search Engines |
Tagged with firefox, Grab Them All, rachael ray, screen capture, search, search literacy, SEO for Firefox, Twitter