The Indicator Guide to tools for capturing webpages and social media content

It’s essential to systematically take screenshots as you investigate accounts, webpages, and other digital assets. But it can be a challenge to efficiently capture content and to store it in a way that helps you see connections and perform analysis.

Fortunately there’s a growing number of web capture tools — including standalone apps and browser extensions — that enable investigators to quickly screenshot and/or download digital content. They range from free, basic extensions that can do one-off screenshots to paid tools that automatically capture content as you browse, hash files, extract IDs and other information, and connect with third-party tools for analysis.

This Indicator Guide covers six full featured web capture tools and five browser extensions for screenshots/screen recording/full page downloads. All but one of the tools offers a free version.

I break down their features and provide charts to compare how they stack up against each other. I also have an exclusive offer for paying members that provides access to the beta client and a private server option for a promising new web capture tool that I’ve been testing for a few weeks.

Note that this guide doesn’t focus on public archiving services like the Wayback Machine or Archive.today. I’ll produce a guide to those in the future. For now, members can read my two part series on getting the most out of the Wayback Machine.