How to Use Scrolling Capture in Shottr

Scrolling capture lets you take a screenshot of an entire scrollable page, like a long web page, a document, or a chat conversation, and stitch it into a single tall image. Shottr defaults to automatic scrolling capture (the app does the scrolling for you), but if that doesn't serve your use case well, you may try the manual capture.

Quick Start

Click the Shottr icon in your menu bar and select Scrolling Capture or Scrolling (Up).
Your cursor becomes a crosshair. Drag to select the entire window you want to capture. It's usually best to include the window borders. You don't need to be pixel-precise — you can always crop the result afterward.
Release the mouse button. Shottr will begin scrolling and capturing automatically.
Don't touch anything. Don't press any keys, don't click the mouse, and don't move the cursor. Any input may stop the process early. If you do want to stop the scrolling, hit Escape.
When Shottr reaches the bottom of the content, the editor opens with your full-page screenshot. To crop it, select the portion of the image that you want to keep, and press Enter.

This workflow should be enough in most cases. If you want faster access, you can assign a keyboard shortcut at Settings → Hotkeys → Scrolling screenshot.

Note: Shottr needs two macOS permissions to work. Both are found in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Shottr will ask for these on first launch, but if something goes wrong, check that both are enabled:

Screen Recording permission lets it capture screen content.
Accessibility permission lets it send scroll events to other apps.

Selecting the Right Area

The most common mistake is selecting too little of the window. If you leave out the bottom portion of the window, Shottr will scroll all the way down, but the content that falls below your selection won't appear in the final image.

Adjusting Settings

Shottr has a few settings that affect scrolling capture. All are found in the app preferences.

Scroll Speed. If you're experiencing problems — choppy results, missed sections, or pages that don't fully load as they scroll — try lowering the speed. A slower scroll gives both Shottr and the target app more time to render each frame properly. Go to Settings → General → Scrolling screenshot speed.
Maximum Height. By default, Shottr stops capturing after the image reaches a certain height. If your page is very long and the capture seems to stop early, go to Settings → General → Scrolling screenshot max height and increase the value. The maximum allowed height is 400,000 pixels. Keep in mind that very long captures use a lot of RAM. Images are stored uncompressed in memory at 4 bytes per pixel, a retina scrolling screenshot of 3,072 × 80,000 pixels, for example, takes nearly 1 GB in your RAM even though the saved JPEG would only be 10–20 MB.
Reverse Scroll Direction. If you use a third-party app that changes your scroll direction (such as MOS, Scroll Reverser, Smooze, BetterTouchTool, BetterMouse, SmoothScroll, LinearMouse, or SteerMouse), Shottr may scroll in the wrong direction, or fail to scroll entirely. Go to Settings → Advanced → Scrolling capture and check "Reverse scroll direction". Note that macOS's built-in "Natural scrolling" setting does not affect Shottr, you only need this setting if a third-party scroll modifiers cause the issue.

Scrolling Up (for Chat Conversations)

Shottr can also scroll upward. This is available under the menu bar icon → More… → Scroll (Up). Why would you want this? Chat apps like Slack and WhatsApp show the most recent messages at the bottom. If you want to capture a long conversation, it's easier to start at the bottom and scroll up than to manually navigate to the very top first.

When Automatic Scrolling Doesn't Work

Scrolling capture relies on macOS scroll APIs and computer vision to stitch frames together. It works well in most situations, but there are cases where it struggles. Here's what can go wrong and what to do about it.

Pages with Animation or Video

This is the most common source of problems. Shottr captures frames as it scrolls and uses computer vision to match overlapping regions between consecutive frames. If something on the page is moving independently of the scroll — a GIF, a video, an animated banner, a scroll-triggered parallax effect — the algorithm gets confused. It may:

Stop too early, thinking the scroll is done.
Continue "scrolling" past the end of the page, producing duplicated sections.
Create visual glitches ("ladder" artifacts) in the stitched image.

What to do: Pause or stop any animations before capturing. If that's not possible, try manual scrolling mode (described below). Unfortunately, there is no guaranteed way to perfectly capture a page with large animations.

Apps That Don't Use Native Scrolling

Some apps simulate their own scrolling instead of using macOS's native scroll mechanism. Known examples:

macOS Terminal and iTerm2
Visual Studio Code
Apple News and Apple Music
Catalyst (iPad-based) apps in general

In automatic mode, these apps produce choppy or broken results. Use manual scrolling mode instead, it's more robust with non-native scroll implementations.

Third-Party Scroll Modifier Apps

Apps like MOS, Scroll Reverser, Smooze, BetterTouchTool, BetterMouse, SmoothScroll, LinearMouse, and SteerMouse intercept and modify scroll events at the system level. This can prevent Shottr from scrolling the target window entirely, or cause it to scroll in the wrong direction. These apps interfere even when you're capturing a completely different app — they affect all scroll events system-wide. Note that MOS may install daemon processes that stay running after the main app is closed, potentially requiring a reboot. What to do:

Try toggling Settings → Advanced → Reverse scroll direction. It may or may not help, depending if the modifier app only reverses the direction, or changes the scroll speed too.
If that doesn't help, switch to manual scrolling mode.

Sticky Headers and Fixed Elements

If a page has a sticky navigation bar or other fixed-position elements, those elements may get captured in every frame and appear repeated throughout the stitched image. In most cases it's enough to make the window that you're capturing larger and repeat the capture. However, if the floating element sits in the middle of the page, it may be defficult or impossible to get rid of it.

Scrollbar Artifacts

The scrollbar in the captured window changes position as the page scrolls, and it often appears choppy in the stitched result. This is normal. To work around it, you can crop it out after the capture is done, or select a slightly narrower area that excludes the scrollbar. You can also select the scrollbar artifacts in the editor and press Delete to erase them.

The Image Looks Small or Low Quality

Scrolling captures are captured at full native resolution. On a Retina display, they're captured at Retina resolution. The image may look small in the editor because Shottr zooms out to fit the entire tall image on screen. Press Cmd+0 to zoom to 100%, or Cmd+Plus to zoom in incrementally. When you save or copy the image, it's the full resolution regardless of the editor's zoom level.

Note that some apps (particularly email clients) will compress or resize large images when you paste them. To preserve quality, save the image as a file (Cmd+S) and attach it directly rather than pasting from the clipboard. Alternatively, use Shottr's drag-n-drop button to drop the file onto your email client, that usually works too.

Manual Scrolling Mode

Manual scrolling is an alternative mode where you control the scrolling yourself instead of letting Shottr do it automatically. It's less convenient but significantly more robust. It works around most of the compatibility issues described above.

How to Enable It

Manual scrolling mode is not available by default. Follow these instructions to enable it:

Enabling Manual Scrolling Capture

How It Works

After enabling manual mode and starting a scrolling capture:

Select your capture area as usual.
Instead of Shottr scrolling for you, you scroll the content yourself using your mouse wheel or trackpad.
A status label appears beneath the selected area. Watch for the "You're going too fast" warning — if you scroll too quickly, Shottr can't capture every frame and you'll get gaps in the result, or the proicess may stop if the app loses the thread completely. If you see the warning, it doesn't mean that this capture is lost: jsut slow down a bit and the app will catch up.
Scroll steadily until you've reached the end of the content.
Stop scrolling and wait. After about three seconds of no scrolling, the capture process finishes and the editor opens with your result.

Tips for Manual Mode

Scroll at a steady, moderate pace. Think of it as a comfortable reading speed. The optimal pace is at about one frame per second, where frame is the height of your selection.
Make sure the page is fully loaded before you begin — lazy-loading content that hasn't rendered yet might appear blank.

Troubleshooting Checklist

If scrolling capture isn't working as expected, work through this list:

Test with a known-good page. Open https://shottr.cc in Safari and try a scrolling capture there. This confirms whether the feature works on your system at all.
Check your selection area. Make sure you're selecting the entire window, including its borders.
Lower the scroll speed. Settings → General → Scrolling screenshot speed. Set it to the lowest and test again.
Check for scroll modifier apps. Quit MOS, Scroll Reverser, Smooze, BetterTouchTool, BetterMouse, SmoothScroll, LinearMouse, SteerMouse, or any similar app and try again. Some of these apps leave daemon processes running, you might need to reboot after you shut down such app.
Try reversing scroll direction. Settings → Advanced → Scrolling capture → Reverse scroll direction.
Increase the max height. Settings → General → Scrolling screenshot max height. Set it higher if the capture seems to stop partway through.
Check Screen Recording permission. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording. Make sure Shottr is enabled. If you have multiple copies of Shottr on your disk, remove the extras — macOS grants the permission to a specific copy.
Check Accessibility permission. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Shottr needs this to send scroll events. On macOS Sequoia, this permission can be silently revoked — try removing Shottr from the list and re-adding it.
Update Shottr. Make sure you're on the latest version.
Try again immediately. Sometimes the first attempt fails but a retry works right away.
Switch to manual mode. If nothing else works, manual scrolling mode works around most of the issues.

Limitations

A few things that scrolling capture doesn't do:

No horizontal scrolling. Only vertical scrolling is supported at the moment.
Animation-heavy pages. There's no reliable way to capture a page with large, continuously running animations.
Sticky elements. Fixed-position elements might get repeated throughout the capture.
No multiple-image output. Scrolling capture always produces one stitched image. There's no option to automatically slice it into multipage PDF or multiple files.
Non-native scroll apps. Terminal, VS Code, iTerm2, Apple News, Apple Music, and Catalyst apps produce choppy results in automatic mode (manual mode works).
It captures what's on screen. Unlike browser extensions that can access the full page DOM, Shottr works at the screen level. It can only capture what it can scroll through and see.