When web scraping, we might want to collect page screenshots or peek into what our headless browsers are seeing for debugging. In Playwright a screenshot can be taken using the screenshot() method of page or
python
from pathlib import Path
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
with sync_playwright() as pw:
browser = pw.chromium.launch(headless=False)
# To save cookies to a file first extract them from the browser context:
context = browser.new_context(viewport={"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
page = context.new_page()
page.goto('https://httpbin.dev/html')
image_bytes = page.screenshot(
full_page=True, # this will try to scroll to capture full page
path='screenshot.png', # this will save the screenshot directly to a file
clip={"x": 0, "y": 0, "width": 100, "height": 100}, # this will clip the screenshot to a specific region
)
# or we can save it manually
Path("screenshot.png").write_bytes(image_bytes)
# we can also take a screenshot of an element
element = page.locator('p')
image_bytes = element.screenshot(path='screenshot.png')
âš Note that when scraping dynamic web pages, screenshots could be captured before the page is fully loaded. For more see how-to-wait-for-page-to-load-in-playwright
For capturing screenshots at scale, consider a cloud Screenshot API. Compare options in our best screenshot API guide.
