How to screenshot on a Chromebook

The built-in ChromeOS screenshot shortcuts

Chromebooks have a dedicated Show windows key (the rectangle with two lines, where F5 sits on a normal keyboard). It is the centre of every screenshot shortcut on ChromeOS.

• Ctrl + Show windows: captures the entire screen immediately.
• Ctrl + Shift + Show windows: opens the capture toolbar, where you can choose full screen, a single window, or drag a partial selection.
• On a tablet or in tablet mode: press the power and volume down buttons together.
• With an external Windows keyboard: Ctrl + F5 and Ctrl + Shift + F5 do the same thing.

Where Chromebook screenshots are saved

Every capture goes to the Downloads folder in the Files app and appears in Tote, the shelf area at the bottom of the screen, where recent screenshots stay one click away.

Downloads is local storage on the Chromebook, not Google Drive. If you want a screenshot to survive a Powerwash, move it to Drive or an external drive yourself.

Why a Chromebook cannot screenshot a full webpage

All of the built-in options capture pixels that are on screen right now. A long article, a pricing page, a report or a dashboard is taller than the screen, so everything below the fold is simply missing.

ChromeOS has no scrolling capture mode, and stitching several shots together by hand almost never lines up: the sticky navigation bar is repeated, and the seams cut sentences in half.

Capture the whole scrolling page on a Chromebook

Because a Chromebook runs the same Chrome as Windows, macOS and Linux, a Chromium extension is the practical route. The steps below take a few seconds per page.

1. 1

   Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store

   GoFullScreenshot installs on ChromeOS exactly as it does on a desktop, and it is free with no account.

2. 2

   Let the page finish loading

   On feeds, galleries and infinite lists, scroll once to the bottom and back to the top so the browser renders everything before the capture starts.

3. 3

   Start a full page capture

   Click the toolbar icon and choose Full page, or set your own keyboard shortcut at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. ChromeOS leaves the Show windows shortcuts untouched, so both systems coexist.

4. 4

   Edit and export

   The stitched image opens in a new tab with a pen, highlighter, text, arrows, shapes and crop. Copy it to the clipboard, or download it as PNG, JPEG, WebP or PDF into Downloads.

What still does not work, honestly

Some limits come from ChromeOS and Chrome themselves, and no extension can work around them.

• Chrome blocks every extension on chrome:// pages, the Chrome Web Store and Chrome's built-in PDF viewer. Use Ctrl + Show windows there instead.
• Android apps from the Play Store and Linux apps are not webpages, so use the built-in ChromeOS shortcuts for those.
• A managed school or work Chromebook can block extension installs entirely. That is an administrator setting, not something a website can change.
• Very tall pages produce very tall images. Exporting numbered parts of 3000 to 5000 pixels with overlap keeps the text readable.

Which method to use when

Use the ChromeOS shortcuts for anything that is not a webpage, or when you only need what is on screen. Use a full page capture whenever the content scrolls and the bottom matters: documentation, invoices, long threads, design reviews and reports.

For step-by-step screenshots of the browser itself, the Chrome guide and the scrolling screenshot guide on this site cover the same ground in more detail.