Core concepts

An Auto Schedule says what to capture and how often. It points at a Web Profile, which says how every capture is rendered and where it is delivered. Everything else — Tags, Trigger Windows, Cloud Storage — hangs off one of those two.

Auto Schedule

One page, captured repeatedly. It holds the URL, an optional description, the start and stop of the schedule, the capture frequency, its time zone, any Tags, the Web Profile it uses, and the optional page tweaks that click, hide or hover something before the shot is taken. Creating one accepts many URLs at once — each line becomes its own schedule. A sitemap schedule is the one exception to “one page”: it captures every page of a sitemap on each run.

Web Profile

The reusable capture recipe. Device and resolution, media type and format, viewport or full page, timeouts, zoom and scale, ad and pop-up blocking, the country the request comes from, browser locale and time zone, headers and cookies, timestamp watermark, email and webhook notifications, change detection, how long captures are kept, and which cloud destinations they are delivered to.

Trigger Window

An optional gate attached to a Web Profile. It lists the times of day, days of the week and days of the month when captures are allowed to run. A schedule that comes round outside the window waits rather than firing — useful for capturing only during trading hours, or only on weekdays. Captures you start by hand ignore it.

Tag

A label you attach to schedules so you can group and filter them — by client, by project, by environment. The schedule list can group by Tag, which turns a long flat list into something navigable.

Cloud Storage profile

A connected destination: Google Drive, Dropbox, or any S3-compatible bucket. A Web Profile can send each capture to as many of them at once as your plan allows — one on Starter, two on Pro, three on Business and Business Plus.

1. The schedule comes round, based on its start time and its interval.
2. If the profile has a Trigger Window, the current time is checked against it. Outside the window, nothing runs.
3. A browser is opened with the profile’s device, resolution, locale, time zone, headers and cookies, from the profile’s country.
4. The page is loaded, within the page timeout. Ads and pop-ups are blocked if enabled.
5. Any hide, click and hover page tweaks on the schedule are applied.
6. The capture is taken — viewport or full page, as an image, a video or a PDF, plus the page source if the profile asks for one.
7. The file is stored, delivered to any connected cloud destinations, and counted against your plan.
8. With change detection on, it is compared with the previous capture of the page, and you are told if it changed.

Three kinds of capture show up in the interface and are worth pinning down, because they describe who asked for a capture rather than how it was taken. The pipeline is identical in all three cases.

Configure screens all live behind one menu: Auto SchedulesConfigure holds Tags, Web Profiles, Trigger Windows and Cloud Storage. They used to sit in the sidebar as separate entries.

Five more screens are not about any one capture but about the account they all run in.