Show HN: Cliperado – Automatically take screenshots of your whole service

Cliperado (https://cliperado.com) is an online tool to automatically take screenshots of your service and keep the shots up-to-date in your help guides.

The idea for Cliperado came when we were creating visual step by step guides, to reduce our support volume, for an other service. We needed about 200 clips for each language. It took so much time to create just a few. I was pulling my hair out. Especially with the thought of having to check all the clips for changes in a month from now, manually.

You’ve probably seen a few online tutorials with outdated and confusing screenshots. You probably have a some outdated screenshot in your own manuals. I get that, it is just too much work to keep these updated manually.

So we created Cliperado, to automate this.

How Cliperado works. Cliperado takes full page retina screenshots of your online service. It can take screenshots of pages behind a login screen as well, by filling out forms, clicking on buttons or hover over menus, etc , etc. You can crop a screenshot, add arrows or highlights, to create clips for step-by-step guides. Cliperado hosts these clips online.

You can schedule Cliperado to refresh the screenshots weekly. Changed screenshots are highlighted in the visual sitemap, so you don’t have to hunt down changes. When you expect a screenshot to change with every refresh, you can mask certain areas, to exclude these from comparison.

We hope you want to give Cliperado a try. We are looking forward to your feedback.

8 points | by arjenschat 1864 days ago

2 comments

  • arciini 1864 days ago
    This looks pretty cool! It feels like it might work as well/even better as a UI testing tool.

    We built a network-based (not UI/headless-browser-based) testing/scraping tool that was a bit like this at https://wrapapi.com back in the day, but the design on this new site looks really good

    • arjenschat 1864 days ago
      Thank you.

      You can use it for testing as well. Cliperado runs headless chrome for the refreshes.

      For Cliperado we run a full screenshot refresh before every deploy. We've caught various bugs that way. After the deploy, a full refresh and screenshot update for the site and docs takes maybe 5 minutes.

  • nielsole 1861 days ago
    While I don't need this, this is one of the projects that "click" . I totally see how useful the could be.