How to screenshot on a Chromebook, including a whole web page

Fastest

The Screenshot key, if your keyboard has one

No Screenshot key

Shift + Ctrl + Show windows

Saved to

Downloads, and copied to the clipboard

A whole web page

Needs Chrome's developer tools or an extension

To take a screenshot on a Chromebook you need one key, or three if your keyboard has no Screenshot key. The built-in tool grabs the whole screen, one window or an area you drag out, copies the image to the clipboard and saves it to Downloads. It can't scroll, though, so a web page longer than your screen gets cut off at the bottom. For that we used a Chrome extension and captured a Wikipedia article 21,027 pixels tall.

The shortcuts

The Show windows key is the one with a rectangle and two lines on it, in the top row of a Chromebook keyboard. All of these open the same Screen capture toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

Full screen, part of the screen or one window

1. In the Screen capture toolbar, make sure Screenshot is selected rather than Screen record.
2. Choose full screen, partial or window.
3. For a partial screenshot, drag over the area you want. From the keyboard, press the space bar to change the section, or press Tab until a corner is highlighted and use the arrow keys to change its height and width.

Where Chromebook screenshots are saved

Screenshots go to the Downloads folder, and each one is copied to the clipboard as well, so you can paste it straight into a message or a document with Ctrl + V. To save them somewhere else, press Shift + Ctrl + Show windows, open the toolbar's Settings and choose Select folder. Screen recordings use the same folder and are saved as .webm video or .gif.

How to screenshot a whole web page on a Chromebook

For an article, a receipt, a long form or a page of search results, the built-in tool runs out at the bottom of the screen. There are two ways to get the whole thing, and both run inside Chrome, so they work on a Chromebook the same way they do on any computer.

Chrome's developer tools

Press Ctrl + Shift + I to open the developer tools, then Ctrl + Shift + P, type "screenshot" and choose Capture full size screenshot. Chrome saves one PNG of the full page. There are no editing or PDF options, and pages that scroll inside a panel, like web apps, often come out cut off. The same developer tools also have an eyedropper for colors, covered in our Google color picker guide.

A full page screenshot extension

The DevTools command has no editing and no PDF export, so for the long-page test we used FullPage Capture, a free full page screenshot extension for Chrome. You start it from its toolbar icon or with Ctrl + Shift + K. It scrolls down the page by itself, stitches the pieces together and opens the result in a new tab, where you can edit it, copy it, print it, or save it as a PNG, JPG or PDF.

We tested it on a long page on purpose: the Wikipedia article on Chromebooks, which is 21,027 pixels tall at normal zoom. The capture took about 25 seconds. At 2x display scaling that came to 2,560 by 42,054 pixels, more than fits in a single image, so the result tab told us it was "too tall for a single image" and split it into two PNG files, with a button to save both at once.

We ran this test in Chrome on a Mac, not on a Chromebook; extensions from the Chrome Web Store run the same way in Chrome on ChromeOS. The split came from the page's height: the first PNG is 2,560 by 28,800 pixels and the second holds the remaining 13,254. We only captured this one page, so we can't tell you exactly where the cutoff is for others.

One button matters more on a Chromebook than it did for us. Save to Drive sends the file straight to Google Drive and skips Downloads, which helps if your Chromebook is short on local storage.

Save a web page as a PDF instead

If you need a document rather than a picture, press Ctrl + P and choose Save as PDF. That gives you the print version of the page, though, and sites often hide sidebars and change their layout for printing. To keep the page as it looks on screen, export the capture as a PDF instead. FullPage Capture's guide on how to save a webpage as PDF compares both ways.

Pages that scroll inside a panel rather than as a whole, such as chat windows, dashboards and email, need a different approach, covered in the FullPage Capture guide to taking a scrolling screenshot.

Chromebook screenshot questions