How to Take Screenshot with Microsoft Edge and Add Notes?

The latest Chromium based Microsoft Edge browser has lots of useful features. Taking web capture or screenshot of webpages is one such feature that many readers would need. This works both in Windows and Mac version and make it easy for quickly capturing webpage you want to read offline. You can also draw markup on the picture to add notes before saving it to your computer. We will explain how you can do all these stuffs in this article.

Web Capture in Edge

In Windows operating system, you can use the default shortcut keys “Win + Shift + S” to take screenshot. However, this will open the Snipping Tool and the options are limited in that tool. Frankly, many users do not like Snipping Tool and use third party screenshot capturing tools like Snagit or others. Similarly on Mac, you can use “Command + Shift + F5” keys to open the Screenshot app which has better options than Windows Snipping Tool app. However, using Web Capture option in Microsoft Edge has the following advantages over the native OS options:

• You can take screenshot of the selected portion or get the scrolling capture of the webpage with entire page content. Good part is that you do not need to struggle with scrolling the page and Edge will automatically scroll and capture the webpage for you.
• You can add quick notes or draw a mark to highlight the content on the screenshot.
• Copy the picture to clipboard or save to your computer.
• It is also possible to add the picture to your collections to keep similar items in a group. When you logged in with Microsoft account, the collections can be synchronized and used across all your devices.

This is very useful for students taking a note for later reading. It is also useful to capture the full page information which is generally available behind a membership or paywall. You do not need to pay or login each time to read the same page’s content.

Open Web Capture in Microsoft Edge

There are multiple ways to open Web Capture in Edge.

• Using keyboard shortcuts is the easiest way and press “Control + Shift + S” in Windows and “Command + Shift + S” in Mac.
• Alternatively, right click on the webpage you want to take screenshot and select “Web Capture” from the context menu.
• Lastly, click on the three dots “Settings and more” icon showing on top right corner and select “Web Capture” from the menu list.

All these will open the Web Capture pop-up with three options – Capture Area, Capture Full Page and Close.

Take Screenshot with Microsoft Edge Web Capture

Click on “Capture Area” option to and use your mouse to draw a rectangular shaped dragger. It will show “Copy” and “Markup Capture” options at the bottom right corner of the selection. You can move the screenshot area and drag any side to adjust the focus. After selecting the correct area, click “Copy” to copy the capture to your clipboard. You will see a flash success message saying “Copied” before the selection disappears. Later, you can paste the item in your clipboard in Word documents or in any supported apps. The “Markup Capture” option will open the captured screen area in a pop-up window for adding markups.

If you want to capture the entire webpage’s content then after opening Web Capture, click “Capture Full Page” option. This will automatically capture the entire page’s content and open in a pop-up window with markup options. This is the same markup window you will see when selecting “Markup Capture” option for area capture.

You can scroll on the pop-up to see the entire page’s content is captured and click on “Draw” option from the top toolbar. It will show a color palette with 25 different colors along with a preview line of a selected color. You can drag the button showing down the preview line to increase or decrease the thickness of the pen.

After selecting the pen’s color and thickness, you can draw anywhere on the picture. Note that you can scroll down and multiple on places wherever you want on the picture to add your notes. If you make any mistakes, click on “Erase” option from the tollbar and rub on the markup item to delete from the picture. You can use this tool freely as it will not delete the content on the captured picture.

Finally, click on the “Save” option to download the marked up picture in JPEG format to your download folder. The file name will be automatically generated with the file name format as “Web capture_Date_Time_Website URL”.

Instead of downloading the picture, you can add the picture to collections by clicking on “Add to Collections” option. Select any existing collection on start a new collection to save your picture.

Finally, click on the three dots icon in the Web Capture pop-up and select “Copy” option. This will copy the entire scrolling picture into your clipboard which you can paste on any other app.

Note: When you have lot of advertisements or unnecessary banners on the page, use Immersive Reader option to remove the clutter. You can click on the “Enter Immersive Reader” icon showing on the address bar (like a book icon with speaker). This will remove all clutters on the page and you can also adjust the “Text Preferences” to change the text size, font family and background. Now you can open the Web Capture and take a scrolling screenshot of the page without any distractions.  

Final Words

We Capture function in Microsoft Edge is useful for capturing webpage content and markup with additional notes. Only problem is that you do not have an option to delay the capture which will be useful to include right click menu or other hovering items on the page.