# Capturing a page that refuses to fit on a screen

> Scrolling capture in hypershot stitches the frames you scroll through into one seamless, tall image. Here is how it works, how fast to scroll, and what the status light is telling you.

Some things do not fit on a screen.

A long thread. A full spec. A chart that keeps going down. You could screenshot the top, scroll, screenshot again, and stitch them together in an editor by eye, aligning the seams and hoping the color and scale match. You have done it. It is miserable.

hypershot's **Scrolling Capture** does the stitching for you, live, while you scroll.

## How you drive it

1. Start a scrolling capture. It's its own capture mode: press `⌘⇧J` on macOS or `Ctrl+Shift+J` on Windows (the defaults; change them in **Settings → Shortcuts**), or pick **Scrolling Capture** from the menu bar or tray menu.
2. Drag a box around the part that scrolls, and only that part.
3. Scroll the content normally, at a steady pace.
4. Hit **Done** when you have it all (or **Cancel** to throw it away).

That is it. The result is a single tall image that combines every visible portion from the scroll, in order.

*Scroll while you capture, and each screenful is stitched onto one tall image.*

## What is actually happening

While you scroll, hypershot grabs frames at roughly eight times per second. Each new frame is matched, pixel by pixel, against the previous one to figure out exactly how far you moved. The new content is then appended to the image that is already being built.

You can watch it happen. A live preview of the stitched image shows in the overlay the whole time, so you are not scrolling blind and hoping the result will hold together. What you see building up is what you get.

## The status light

The capture HUD shows a status indicator, and it is worth reading while you go:

- **Capturing** (green) — frames are stitching together cleanly. Keep going.
- **No New Content** (grey) — it has not detected any scroll. Scroll a little more.
- **Reached End** (green) — you may be at the bottom of the content.
- **Scroll Forward** (yellow) — you scrolled back up. Keep heading down.
- **Slow Down** (yellow) — you are scrolling faster than the stitcher can align frames.
- **Max Size Limit** (yellow) — you hit the maximum image height your GPU supports. The session pauses itself so you are not left holding a broken capture.

Most of the time it is the green one. The others are there so the tool tells you when it needs a nudge instead of quietly producing a bad image. Amber pills under the status warn you before you even start: a selection too small to stitch reliably, or one with fixed content in it.

## The two habits that make it clean

- **Scroll steadily.** A moderate, consistent speed gives the alignment step overlapping content to match against. Sudden jumps and flicks are the things that break it.
- **Leave the sticky header out.** A nav bar that stays put while the page moves confuses the stitch, and hypershot will flag it ("Fixed content detected"). Select just the content that scrolls.

There is a real ceiling: the tallest stitched image you can make is bounded by your GPU's maximum texture size. For most documents and threads you will not get close to it. For a genuinely enormous page, capture it in a couple of passes.

## The point

A page that scrolls is still a single document. Your capture of it should be, too.

Scrolling Capture treats the whole page as one thing and gives you one image back. No seams, no scale mismatch, no "these three screenshots do not quite line up." The page is long. So is your screenshot. Good.

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From https://hypernuclear.com/blog/tall-threads/