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Reject Screenshots—Embrace Archives; When You Wanna Screenshot a Page, Archive It As Well

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While screenshots are a convenient way to share something online as well as hold evidence in case the original is deleted, they’re easy to fake convincingly (see Inspect Element). Because of that, you should share an archived link instead (or even in addition) of the screenshot. You can archive a link in online archives such as The Wayback Machine by The Internet Archive and Archive.today.

You don’t even have to navigate to those sites to archive a link. I’ve provided simpler approaches below.

  1. You can add the archive URL in front of the page’s URL (represented by <url>).
    • https://web.archive.org/save/<url> for the Internet Archive.
    • https://archive.today/?run=1&url=<url> for Archive.today
  2. Bookmark this Save to Online Archives Bookmarklet and click it whenever you want to save a page on the Internet Archive. It’s old fashioned and it doesn’t open both tabs, but it’s an option if you’re interested. Here’s the code:
    javascript:(function(){window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+window.location.href,'_blank');window.open('https://archive.today/?run=1&url='+window.location,'_blank')})()
  3. If you use iOS/MacOS/iPadOS, I’ve also made the Save to Online Archives Shortcut. The benefit to this approach is that it has an easier time opening multiple links. All you need to do is share a page or link and select Save to Online Archives. It will then save it to both archives.

Share responsibly!