How to take a scrolling screenshot on Linux

GNOME Screenshot, Spectacle and Flameshot all capture what is on screen right now. None of them captures a page that runs past the bottom of the window. Here is what works instead.

Web pages: use the browser

If the page is in a browser, you don't need a screenshot tool at all.

Firefox

Press Ctrl + Shift + S, then choose Save full page. Firefox saves or copies one tall image of the whole page.

Chrome, Chromium and Edge

Open DevTools with F12, press Ctrl + Shift + P, type screenshot and pick Capture full size screenshot. The file goes to your downloads folder.

Both methods render the page again at full height, so sticky headers and lazy-loaded images can look different from what you saw. For a support ticket that is usually fine; for documentation you may want to check the result.

Anything that isn't a web page

A settings panel, a chat thread, a spreadsheet or a terminal's scrollback is not a web page, and the browser trick doesn't apply. The free Linux capture tools don't stitch scrolling windows, so you have two options: take several screenshots and join them in an image editor by hand, or use an app that scrolls the window for you.

Wayland and X11

On Wayland, an app can't simply read the screen: it asks the desktop through the xdg-desktop-portal screenshot and screencast interfaces, and the desktop asks you for permission the first time. On X11, capture is direct. Any tool you pick needs to support the portal if you run GNOME or KDE Plasma on Wayland, which is the default on current releases of both.

Scrolling capture in GrabCanvas

1. Download GrabCanvas for Linux from the download page, extract it and run grabcanvas. On Wayland, approve the portal prompt the first time.
2. Open the window you want to capture and press Ctrl + Shift + 4.
3. GrabCanvas scrolls the window for you and stitches the frames into one image. Some applications draw their own scrolling (certain Electron apps and games); for those, use the manual scroll mode, where you scroll and GrabCanvas captures as you go.
4. The editor opens with the finished image. Add arrows, numbered steps or blur, then copy, save or export it.

The shortcut can be changed in Preferences. If your compositor doesn't expose the global-shortcuts portal yet, GrabCanvas shows you the command to bind in your desktop's keyboard settings.

Which method should you use?

• One web page, once: the browser's full-page capture. Free and already installed.
• Non-browser windows, or you do this often: a tool with scrolling capture. GrabCanvas is $29 once, covers Windows and macOS too, and has a free trial with every feature.

For how GrabCanvas compares with Flameshot, Shutter, Ksnip and Spectacle, see the Linux page.