Is a screenshot enough?¶

Usually not. A screenshot records the pixels visible on a screen at one moment. It may show useful content, but it does not automatically preserve where the content came from or how the browser obtained it.

What the image leaves out¶

A screenshot may omit the full URL, redirects, account state, content below the visible area and technical responses from the service. It cannot by itself show whether a page was live, cached, personalised or changed by a browser extension.

Think of it as a photograph of a letter. The photograph records its appearance, but the envelope, postmark and route may explain where it came from and when it was sent.

Keep the screenshot, but record the complete URL separately as text, together with the date, time, time zone, device, browser, signed-in account and steps used to reach the page. Where proportionate, other material such as response headers, downloaded files or a specialist web capture may preserve information the image cannot.

Do not crop, annotate or recompress the only copy. Preserve the original and make a separate working or presentation copy.