Shot-scraper: Automated Web Screenshots

Have you ever needed to take screenshots of a web page programmatically? Perhaps to document your project, monitor UI changes, or generate images for social media. There are many ways to do it, but shot-scraper stands out for its ease of use and power.

Created by Simon Willison, shot-scraper is a command line interface (CLI) tool that wraps Playwright to make taking screenshots trivial.

Installation¶

As with other modern Python tools, the best way to install it is using uv:

uv tool install shot-scraper

Once installed, you'll need to download the browser it uses under the hood (Chromium):

shot-scraper install

Basic Usage¶

The simplest way to use it is to give it a URL and a filename:

shot-scraper https://pablocaro.es/en/ blog.png

This will generate an image named blog.png with the screenshot of the page.

Capturing Specific Selectors¶

One of the most powerful features is the ability to capture only a specific element of the page using CSS selectors:

shot-scraper https://github.com/pcaro -s ".js-calendar-graph" calendar.png

This command will capture only the GitHub contribution graph.

Interacting with JavaScript¶

Sometimes you need to execute some code before taking the shot. For example, to hide a cookie banner or wait for something to load.

shot-scraper https://pablocaro.es/en/ \
  --javascript "document.querySelector('header').style.display = 'none';" \
  -o no-header.png

Advanced Automation¶

If you need to take many screenshots, you can define a YAML configuration file:

# shots.yml
- url: https://pablocaro.es/en/
  output: home.png
  height: 800
- url: https://pablocaro.es/en/archives.html
  output: archives.png
  wait: 1000  # Wait 1 second

And run them all at once:

shot-scraper multi shots.yml

Beyond Screenshots¶

shot-scraper also includes utilities for:

• Accessibility: Dump the accessibility tree of a page (shot-scraper accessibility).
• PDF: Generate PDFs of web pages (shot-scraper pdf).
• HAR: Record HAR files to analyze network traffic (shot-scraper har).

It's one of those tools that, once installed, you find uses for constantly. Perfect for integrating into CI/CD pipelines to generate documentation visuals automatically.

More info in the official documentation.