Hello Igor,

First of all, thank you for your efforts to make the screenshot feature even more stable. I appreciate the effort and think it's one of the standout features of Collecta. Few other tools that I know of implement this so well.

In addition to the potentially cost-intensive variant for European sites, I would like to add an additional idea that might cover more cases in a simpler way.

This is an idea which I am familiar with from another tool, namely "Boardflow", and which I use extremely often there. It's the option of screenshotting a specific area via the extension. See this screen cast as an inspiration how this works in Boardflow: https://video.hofians.com/conversations/abd97909-22a8-502b-8546-3212391655ec

The advantages are manifold:

First, by making it a local screenshot through the extension, it eliminates all the problems you have when you do a screenshot on the server side.

Secondly, it also makes it possible to take screenshots of pages that are behind a login or a paywall.

Thirdly, and this is my practical experience, in at least 70 percent of cases it is almost more meaningful if I select a certain area of the website as the relevant one than to take a complete screenshot. (As one example see my screencast above of taking a screenshot of a youtube video without all the comments and video suggestions all around the page.)

The bottom line is that I estimate that in about 70 percent of all cases I would rather only take a partial screenshot, which I select because that is more meaningful and in about 30 percent of cases I want to preserve the complete content and therefore the current screenshot feature of the entire page would be important.

Mabe you like the idea as an additional method.

Kind regards,

Sven.

Hey Sven, sorry just saw this!

You described the use cases & needs for the partial screenshot perfectly, which is why I'm building the native macOS client https://collecta.space/feedback/p/macos-app-to-take-screenshots-anywhere.

Technically this could also be a part of the extension too, but I personally just prefer the native experience to often janky JavaScript-based screenshoters. Of course this limits the use for this feature to macOS users however, but this is a start.

But honestly I'd much rather dig into something like Rust / Electron and still build an app for Windows, than baking too much into the browser extension. Not sure yet!

Thank you for your efforts. The screenshot creation does indeed seem to work much more reliably now 👍

Here are a few more thoughts:

The advantage I see in a solution via the extension is:

➀ it is immediately available to all users

➁ it does not need to be installed (this is not always allowed on company notebooks)

With a Windows/Mac application I also see advantages like an increased usability (e.g. more possibilities for shortcuts, screenshots outside the browser; perhaps even offline support later on etc.).

But yes, from the user's point of view, I don't really care how it's solved anyway.

Now I would like to motivate you to provide a solution for Windows users immediately after the iOS solution. I work on Windows and Android myself - so will have to be patient 😉

➕

I can confirm from my current tests that we need an alternative way to generate screenshots locally. There are simply too many cases where there is no access to the current page on the server side.

(Most recently, for example, when putting together an Ikea wardrobe and trying to save the result → of course Collecta cannot access this information on the server side)

❓ Is there already an entry for the request to “Create local partial screenshot”, or should I create one?

The first tests were successful. The screenshots have worked so far.

In one case, however, the text of an article was NOT completely transferred. Is this perhaps an OG card you were talking about?

The URL was: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000221851/hauspreise-in-oesterreich-deutlich-staerker-gestiegen-als-im-eu-vergleich

I now found a link that is NOT working - also "try again" gives no result - maybe because it contails the tracking-id-thing ...

The resulting URL you get redirected to works fine

Thanks for the catch, I just fixed this! Both of these URLs should work fine!

I get the error message "Something went wrong" when trying the URL!?

Sven, I'm sorry I'm not sure I understand. What's happening before you see this error?

Update: I think I know what you mean now. There was a server error that should be resolved now. Sorry for any trouble!

Sorry for beeing imprecise.

Just tried it again. If I add the bookmark ( https://bakadesuyo.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b083212130155b748c7785081&id=d4e78a59ed&e=c66c7616d1 ) manually via Collecta site after hitting the Collect button I get the error "Something went wrong".

Just had two cases where I added linkedin URLs via extension to collecta.

Both show a broken image icon and no retry button

Hey Sven, could you drop me a message in chat (https://collecta.space/account/#anchor-support), I'll be able to help you. I might need to ask you a few details though. This looks like this specifically is unrelated to the screenshots though, but it might be something else.

Yes, I would also display an “alternative” information if the screenshot is not possible. I don't know what the “OG Card” is. Maybe you could also show the favicon of the page. An excerpt from the content is also an interesting idea.

What I would definitely like to see is: “An option (button ?) to manually trigger the creation of the screenshot again.

For some bookmarks the screenshot will not be so important. But for some pages I might really want to preserve the complete content - then it would be good to be able to start a new attempt.

Sven, sorry! OG (short for Open Graph) is a common standard of previewing the links. You know how you share a link on Twitter, or send it to someone in a preview image pops up? That's what I mean!

Yes definitely, retriggering a screenshot is also a good fix for this!