I’m not sure why, but it warms my heart to see an update to Paparazzi!. This has long been a useful tool and I had assumed that it would eventually die off. The latest version came out yesterday with the usual Mountain Lion goodies.

Paparazzi! is a tool for capturing web pages in their full length. There are a bunch of tools that do this, and some are amazing at organization and storage as well (such as LittleSnapper). Paparazzi!, however, stole my heart long ago with the ability to just hand me vector PDFs that are searchable in Spotlight, annotatable in Skim et al, and, of course, taggable and sortable with the extra metadata fields available in the PDF format.

I like all of that because it doesn’t lock me into a database or confine how I can use the resulting files. I don’t store as many PDFs as I once did, but when I do, I want them to be usable for search and organization. You can also output PNG and JPEG files, if you need to. There are $15-50 apps doing the same thing, and none of them handle this simple task as well or with as much flexibility as Paparazzi! does for free.

The new version has more batch capabilities, native full screen mode and Mountain Lion’s sharing options. It still has the same awesome AppleScript library that it’s had for a long time, as well as a set of Automator actions. You can actually just feed it a list of urls in plain text form and have it capture and file all of them for you, but I enjoy the scripting flexibility. I even built it into the Pinboard → OpenMeta system so you can add a tag to a Pinboard bookmark and end up with a filed, searchable PDF locally.

Paparazzi! is, by the way, free. I’ve used it since about 2005, if I recall correctly. I made another donation today (finally, it’s been at least 4 years). If you dig it, you should consider doing the same. It’s odd to see a small app from an indie developer stay alive this long, but I’m thankful it has. Great stuff.