Capture a page

By the end you will have a frozen copy of a page, hosted by Pinafly, that looks the way it did when you froze it and stays that way while the real page changes.

Before you start: install the Pinafly extension and connect it to your account. See Install the extension. Looking for steps in another tool? Browse the guides.

Freeze a page

1. Open the page in Chrome and get it into the state you want reviewed. See Freeze the state you want.
2. Click the Pinafly icon in the toolbar.
3. Under Add to, choose where the page goes:
   • + New flow starts a new set of pages. Optional: give it a name.
   • An existing flow adds the page to the end of it.
4. Click the freeze button.

A new tab opens on the frozen page within a few seconds. You can read it and comment on it straight away. Pictures fill in by themselves shortly after, and the page says how many are still arriving.

To build a review of several pages, freeze each one into the same flow. The extension remembers the flow you last used for an hour.

Freeze the state you want

A freeze records the page exactly as it is on your screen at that moment. It does not click anything for you. So open the menu, switch the tab, fill the form or dismiss the cookie banner first, then freeze. If you need several states of the same page, freeze each one.

Anything behind a login works, because the freeze happens in your own browser.

What a frozen page keeps, and what it leaves out

• Kept: the layout, text, styles, fonts and images as you saw them.
• Images are resized and compressed, so a frozen page stays small.
• Left out: video and audio are never captured. A video becomes its poster image or a blank box of the same size.
• Left out: scripts. A frozen page is a picture of the page you can inspect and comment on, not a working copy. It never loads anything from the original site afterwards.
• Left out: cookies and login tokens found in the page are removed before it is saved.

If a freeze does not finish

You will see This freeze did not finish. Nothing half-saved is kept. Go back to the page and freeze it again. If the same page fails every time, see The extension stopped working.