Introducing Snappy (Patreon)

I’ve been using tools like AutoScreenCap for years to automatically capture screenshots on an interval, but I wanted something that was more cross-platform and had more features. I decided to build my own alternative: Snappy!

Snappy is a Progressive Web App (PWA) that can run in any modern web browser, or it can be “installed” to look and feel more like a desktop application. It can be used to automatically capture a screenshot at a specified interval, down to one screenshot every single second. Snappy can save screenshots in PNG, JPEG, or WebP format, and can even send status updates (but not the images) to a Discord channel using webhooks, which can be useful for remote monitoring.

Snappy uses the getDisplayMedia browser API to capture your screen, just like Zoom and other web apps. In Chromium browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, etc.), the API allows Snappy to capture any screen, application window, or browser tab. It even works for tabs running in the background, which are normally off-limits to native screenshot tools. Firefox and Safari only support capturing screens and windows, and there’s at least one Safari-specific bug that I haven’t been able to fix yet.

Snappy takes advantage of the File System Access API to save screenshots to any location on your computer. That includes folders inside cloud storage folders, so you can quickly share screenshots with other people if needed. However, only Chromium browsers have fully implemented that API. In other browsers, like Safari and Firefox, screenshots are saved to your Downloads folder.

I was looking at a few different frameworks for building a screenshot application, such as Dart or Python, but a web app ended up being the best option. Since all the screen capture functionality is provided by the browser, and the new File System Access API is pretty simple, the initial working demo of Snappy was under 100 lines of JavaScript.

I know most people don’t have a need for automatic screenshots, but I need it for my work on a somewhat regular basis (mostly capturing images from livestreams), and I think Snappy is already one of the best tools for the job. It might be especially useful on Chromebooks/ChromeOS, because most similar screenshot utilities aren’t available on that platform.

I have some ideas for additional features, like keyboard shortcuts and camera capture support, but I consider Snappy “feature complete” already. I needed something that could take screenshots automatically and worked on more than just Windows, and Snappy does both.

You can try Snappy at thesnappy.app and the source code is on GitHub.