In the days when the web was still young, all you needed to do to save most of the contents of a web page was to copy them to a text editing application. Then frames came along and complicated things and today we have web sites that are a hundred times more complex. Browsers themselves have also become far more complex and now it is possible to save web archives, giving you a functional copy of the page you saved, complete with images, but this will only be viewable from within the browser it was saved with. Simple screenshots remain the best way for creating accessible, transferable snapshots of the web, but these have the limitation of the screen dimensions. To work around this, it is possible to simply ‘print’ web pages to a file, letting you get the entire contents of the page, no matter how long it stretches down. While this can be done using nothing but OS X built in print functionality, the result will not look identical, various elements being improperly handled. The best solution is to simply use a dedicated application, something like Paparazzi!.

What it does
Paparazzi! is an application that will let you take snapshots of web pages, giving you visually identical image files that can be easily shared and opened with virtually any application. It has a very robust batch capture feature that lets you easily take snapshots of many different web pages and save with a historical naming convention.

Working with it
What Paparazzi! does is nothing new and there are many other applications out there that will do the same thing. However, the key difference is the way they approach the problem. While most such applications focus on browser integration and letting you easily take a snapshot of the page you are viewing, this program focuses more on letting you easily take many snapshots, with minimal work.

Since Paparazzi! is not integrated into your browser, using it is not simply a matter of clicking a toolbar button, although it is quite simple nevertheless. There are many ways to open a web site in Paparazzi!, first and foremost being just typing out the address of the site. While this may sound a little daunting if the actual page you want is buried deep within the site, the program does have something called ‘Interact with Web View’ which slides out a panel in which you can click on the actual links and elements of the site as if you were in a browser proper. Alternatively, you can just paste a link already copied from the browser you use.
Other methods include a Bookmarks menu, which gives you access to Safari, Firefox, Address Book and Bonjour entries all from one central location. The application will automatically keep these updated, so you don’t have to do anything except select the right one. Last but not least, you can capture a URL from the tab of the top window of the browsers you currently have running.

The next thing you have to set is the size of the captured result. From the minimum size, you can specify the width and height of the output. The content will be scaled to fit horizontally and if it goes beyond the specified vertical value, the capture will simply extend with it. There is no actual limit to how high the resulting capture can stretch, other than the actual content on the site you are working with.
If you only want a small portion of the site, you need to enable the crop values, which will simply trim any part of the capture outside of the area you specify.
To make things easier, both of these settings work of size presets, which you can adjust in the preferences.

Once you are satisfied with the results, you can simply save the capture in one of various image formats and be on your way.

A batch of batches
If for sporadic, single snapshots of web pages you can use just about any application, when it comes to multiple snapshots, especially when you do them on a regular basis, Paparazzi! truly starts to shine.
From its batch window you can add links and files to be processed, set the desired size for the batch job and let it go while you go on to do other things or simply take a break.
Moreover, the application can handle a special URL format that lets you specify parameters along with the destination of the snapshot all in one single line. It even supports drag and drop of a folder, adding any and all saved URLs and searches to the batch queue.
Between this and the ability to automatically structure snapshots into per host subdirectories, as well as automatic name generation using variables of your choice, Paparazzi! offers a very solid batch processing solution, which makes creating hundreds of different snapshots as simple as dragging a folder and hitting go.

The Good
Great batch processing capabilities with customized URL handling and file name generation. Very easy to use, despite its complex features.

The Bad
Documentation is poor, being next to non-existent. While for general use this is not a major problem, the more advanced features can be confusing to those not familiar with scripting.

The Truth
Paparazzi! may be a little rough around the edges, but it is a very solid application, perfect for people who need to take web snapshots on a regular basis.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: