pixelbrowse

PixelBrowse — Screenshot-based Web Reading

Use pixelshot to capture any URL or document as tiled JPEG images, then read the images visually.

Requires the pixelshot command on PATH. If pixelshot is not found, install it (isolated, on PATH): uv tool install pixelrag (or pipx install pixelrag, or pip install pixelrag) — then retry. Don't go hunting for it in project venvs.

How to use

# Screenshot a URL (optimized for Claude's vision: 1568px tile height)
pixelshot <url> --output /tmp/pixelbrowse --tile-height 1568 --wait-network-idle

# Screenshot multiple URLs in parallel
pixelshot <url1> <url2> --output /tmp/pixelbrowse --tile-height 1568 --wait-network-idle --workers 4

# Wider viewport for desktop layouts
pixelshot <url> --output /tmp/pixelbrowse --tile-height 1568 --viewport-width 1280 --wait-network-idle

# Render a PDF
pixelshot document.pdf --output /tmp/pixelbrowse

IMPORTANT: Always use --tile-height 1568 for screenshots you will read visually. Claude's vision model downscales images with long edge > 1568px (Sonnet/Haiku) or 2576px (Opus). The default 8192px tile height will be downscaled and text becomes unreadable. Note that the tile height is also the emulated viewport height, so at 1568 an ordinary article is a dozen-plus tiles rather than one or two — the manifest tells you how many (see Workflow).

IMPORTANT: Always use --wait-network-idle for URLs. Without it, JavaScript-heavy pages (most modern sites / single-page apps) are captured before they finish rendering and come back blank or half-empty. It waits for the page's load event plus a brief network-quiet window so client-rendered content is actually on screen.

After rendering, read the tile images from the output directory to visually understand the content.

Workflow

1. Run pixelshot <url> --output /tmp/pixelbrowse --tile-height 1568 --wait-network-idle
2. Read /tmp/pixelbrowse/<domain>.png.tiles/tiles.json — the manifest of what was captured
3. Read every tile it lists, in order, not just tile_0000.jpg