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Does Chromatic Capture Full-Page Screenshots or Only Story Viewports?

Chromatic captures the full height of a rendered Storybook UI by default. Set cropToViewport to true to clip a taller story to its configured viewport height.
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Chromatic captures the full height of a rendered Storybook UI by default, even when you set a viewport height. To limit a snapshot to that height, set parameters.chromatic.cropToViewport: true. The result is still a component snapshot: Chromatic crops away surrounding space to the component’s bounding box, so “full-page” here means the rendered UI’s height under the capture settings—not an unlimited screenshot of the entire browser page.

What “full-page” means in Chromatic

Chromatic’s default Storybook capture includes the full height of the rendered UI. A viewport height controls the browser dimensions used to render the story, but it does not, by itself, clip a taller UI to that height. The captured area is also cropped to the component’s bounding box, removing surrounding negative space.

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That makes Chromatic’s behavior different from a conventional full-browser-page screenshot: it captures the rendered story or component, not an unlimited image of every part of a website surrounding it.

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How to limit a Storybook snapshot to its viewport

Use the Storybook Modes API to set the viewport dimensions, then enable Chromatic’s viewport crop parameter. For example, add the parameter to the story or component configuration where you want it applied:

export default {
  parameters: {
    chromatic: {
      cropToViewport: true,
    },
  },
};

Configure the viewport’s width and height using Modes. With cropToViewport: true, content extending below the selected viewport height is clipped. If the root container is shorter than the selected height, Chromatic trims the snapshot to the root’s intrinsic height instead; it does not add empty space to fill the viewport.

When you do not specify a viewport, Chromatic documents a default viewport of 1200 × 900 pixels. Without a specified viewport height, snapshot height follows the root container’s intrinsic height.

Modes versus the legacy viewport setting

Configuration Can set viewport height? What to use it for
Storybook Modes API Yes Set width, height, or both; combine a height with cropToViewport: true when the snapshot should stop at the viewport.
Legacy chromatic.viewports API No It does not support setting height. Chromatic documents Modes as its successor and recommends it for height control.

Other capture limits to know

Chromatic documents viewport dimensions from 200 to 2560 pixels and a maximum of 25,000,000 pixels per snapshot. Its documentation also notes a Safari and Firefox rendering limit of 32,767 pixels in width or height. At device pixel ratio (DPR) 2.0, that image-dimension ceiling can be reached at half the corresponding CSS-pixel dimension.

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Chromatic says visual captures use DPR 2.0 starting with Capture 9. If an image exceeds Safari or Firefox’s dimension limit, Chromatic retries the capture at DPR 1.0. These image-size limits are separate from the crop setting: cropping controls which content is included, while DPR and browser limits affect the rendered image dimensions.

Vitest and Cypress use their configured test viewport

Chromatic also supports viewport configuration for Vitest and Cypress, where captures use the viewport configured for the test. The detailed cropToViewport behavior described above is documented for Storybook Modes; do not assume that the same configuration syntax applies unchanged to those integrations.

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When you need a screenshot of a whole website page

Chromatic is for visual snapshots of rendered UI in component and test workflows. If your task instead is to request a screenshot or PDF of a live URL, ScreenshotNeo is an alternative to try first: it is a website screenshot API and MCP server, with clean captures and billing limited to clean shots. It serves a different use case from Chromatic’s story snapshots.

Or skip the browser setup

Make one GET request with a URL to return a PNG, JPEG, WebP, or PDF. For example, this cURL request saves a WebP screenshot of Stripe:

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curl -G "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot" -d access_key=YOUR_API_KEY --data-urlencode url=https://stripe.com -o shot.webp

See the ScreenshotNeo API documentation for request options. Cookie banners, popups, and chat widgets are removed before the shot; bot checks, blank pages, and failed loads are never billed. An MCP server lets AI agents take screenshots. The free plan includes 1,000 screenshots a month with no card; paid plans start at $5 for 3,000.

Sign up for ScreenshotNeo’s free plan to get 1,000 screenshots a month with no card.

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