FAQ
I receive a lot of questions about my sites and screencapping, and here I have tried to answer the most-commonly-asked ones. :)
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How do you create your screencaps? Is it really just one person running this website?
Yes – it’s still just me! 😊 Every gallery on Screencaps.US is created, checked and uploaded by hand. While I’ve built custom tools and scripts over the years to speed up the workflow, every movie and TV episode still goes through the same process before it’s published.
Today I create the galleries on a 2024 Apple Mac mini using a combination of professional and custom-built tools:
- FFmpeg extracts high-quality screenshots directly from the source video. For HDR and Dolby Vision releases, I use a custom tone-mapping workflow to ensure the screenshots match the movie’s intended colours as closely as possible.
- FlowVision lets me quickly browse thousands of screenshots and remove blurred frames, fades to black, studio logos and any other unwanted images.
- Name Mangler automatically renames and numbers every screenshot in sequence.
- Finally, I use rclone to upload the finished galleries to my cloud storage, where they’re made available on the website.
Although the software does much of the repetitive work, creating a single gallery still involves checking thousands of screenshots by hand before they’re published. With over 2,000 galleries available and more added regularly, it’s definitely become a labour of love!
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How many screenshots do you capture from each movie? Can you go back and capture a specific scene for me?
All galleries on Screencaps.US are created automatically at a rate of 2.5 screenshots per second. That works out to around 13,500 screenshots for a typical 90-minute movie, which provides excellent coverage of almost every scene without creating unnecessarily huge downloads.
I’ve found this to be the best balance between image quality, completeness and the storage costs involved in hosting such a large archive.
Unfortunately, I can’t go back and capture individual scenes on request. Once a movie has been processed, I permanently delete the digital source file and donate or sell any physical DVDs or Blu-rays. This helps keep storage requirements manageable and ensures the collection doesn’t continue to grow indefinitely.
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Do you know of a Windows program I can use to make screencaps myself?
Sorry, I really don’t! I’ve been a Mac user for many years, so I have very little experience with Windows software and wouldn’t want to recommend something I haven’t personally used.
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How did you build your websites?
All of the websites in the Screencaps.US network are built with WordPress. I’ve worked as a web designer and developer for many years, so building and maintaining the sites myself was the obvious choice.
Over the years I’ve added a number of custom features and automation tools to handle everything from importing movie information and generating download links to managing the thousands of galleries across the network.
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What WordPress theme are you using?
All of the sites currently use the excellent Heap theme by Pixelgrade.
I’ve customised it extensively over the years to suit the needs of a large screenshot archive, while keeping it lightweight, responsive and easy to navigate. Since the gallery pages can contain thousands of high-resolution images, performance has always been one of my biggest priorities.
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What WordPress plugins do you use?
The sites use a fairly small collection of plugins, together with a number of custom-built features and tools that I’ve developed specifically for Screencaps.US.
Current plugins include:
- Akismet Anti-Spam
- Automatic Post Scheduler
- Custom Field Template
- Drag & Drop Featured Image
- FooBox Image Lightbox (Premium)
- Google Site Kit
- Jetpack (Comments, Contact Form, Image CDN and other utilities)
- Multi-column Tag Map
- W3 Total Cache
- Yoast SEO
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Can I use these images for commercial products or projects?
No. The screenshots on this website remain the copyright of the respective film studios, production companies and copyright holders. They are provided here for personal, educational and other non-commercial use only.
If you choose to use them for anything else, you do so entirely at your own risk.
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Do the ZIP downloads contain more or higher-quality images than the online galleries?
No. The ZIP downloads contain exactly the same full-resolution images that you see in the online galleries—nothing more and nothing less.
They’re simply provided as a convenient way to download the entire gallery in one file, rather than browsing through dozens of pages to save individual screenshots.
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Who are you?
My name is Micah. I’m a web designer and photographer living in Europe with my husband and young daughter.
Outside of running these websites, we love travelling together and are huge Disney fans, especially when it comes to visiting the Disney parks around the world.
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Why did you start these websites?
It all began with a love of animation.
I originally created DisneyScreencaps as a way to celebrate the incredible artistry behind Disney’s animated films—the beautiful backgrounds, expressive animation and attention to detail that often go unnoticed when watching a movie at full speed.
Over the years, the project has grown far beyond Disney to include animation from many studios, live-action films, Star Wars, Star Trek and television series. No matter the genre, every film and show contains moments of incredible craftsmanship that deserve to be appreciated frame by frame.
I also hope these galleries are useful to anyone studying animation, cinematography, filmmaking, visual effects, costume design, lighting, composition, storytelling, or simply anyone who enjoys looking a little closer at the art of filmmaking.
21 Comments
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I wrote out a whole reply to you last week but it seems the site ate it. :( In short, no. All galleries need to be protected by Patreon. Why? With the old download links hosted by FileFactory, downloads did not cost me anything. No matter how many people downloaded a file, it was free for me. So it was an easy choice to offer it to everyone for free. However, FileFactory proved to be super unreliable. Downloads were slow, some of the popup ads people had to sit through were horrible, and zip files often randomly disappeared off their servers, causing many dead links. You get what you pay for, I guess. So after many many complaints, I decided to move to a new server for the zip files. One that is ad free, fast, and where files will NOT disappear. However, this one costs me money for every single download. If 5,000 people decide to download 1 zip file, it’ll cost me hundreds of dollars. These sites are just a hobby for me, I don’t earn anything from them, so I need to cover the costs. I literally can’t afford to pay for all this by myself. A one-off payment of $3 USD will give you access to all 2,000+ zip files for 30 entire days. It helps me pay for the downloads, at as-low-a-cost-as-possible. So far, most people download only a couple of zip files in their 30-day period, so the $3 is enough to cover the costs. I understand this is annoying – trust me, I’d rather give it all out for free as well. Alas, I cannot afford that, so this is the way it has to be. I hope you now understand. :)
Well can we at least have the screencap request list free to view please? It’s hard to keep track of what we have and what we still need without that request list. And how will we know whether something wasn’t already requested by another user?
In short I loved keeping track of the progress of screening and I’d give the moon and the stars to have that a free option again without need of Patreon.
Please make that a possibility.
Hi Nathan! I had initially made the Request section Patreon-only to combat SPAM. Again it’s one of those cases where a few ruin it for the many. I had bots creating thousands of new user accounts and requests every single day, and I was wasting my time deleting the SPAM instead of actually capping new movies. Making the Request section Patreon only, solved that problem immediately. Since it’s been a while, I have now taken the Patreon requirement OFF the Request section again (I do understand how it’s useful for you!) and we shall see how we go. I can’t promise it’ll stay free – if the SPAM returns, I’ll make it Patreon-only again, sorry!
Ah, I just emailed you about this but I’ll also leave a comment just incase! The search link seems to be dead for animationscreencaps.com, but it works fine on the other websites. Wanted to bring this to your attention, but if you’re already aware please disregard! Thank you
Try to log in but keeps saying the weblink can’t be found.
Why do we have to sign into Patreon in order to make movie requests now? Can’t we just request our screencaps freely? Patreon accounts are expensive!
I would really appreciate being able to request screen caps without need of that burden of a site. Please?
Why do we have to sign into Patreon in order to make movie requests now?
Well, I obviously don’t have knowledge of your particular situation, but as a software developer myself, allow me to share one of the golden rules of debugging: “when in doubt, check the logs”. Log files are your friends. They can show you exactly which IP addresses are being blocked, and possibly help you figure out a common pattern that they all follow (e.g., all of them might be from the same service provider, or the same geographic region, or the same subdomain, etc.). If you can find that pattern, you can add a rule to your server configuration to explicitly allow IP addresses that match the pattern, and voila — problem solved.
I appreciate that! Unfortunately I am not a software developer, just someone who builds WordPress sites as a hobby, nor am I an expert in how to read log files or server configurations, or any of that. Since the caps are shown through WordPress’ Photon system, and then CDN’d via Cloudflare, I don’t even think there’s any log files I can see. I’m just a movie & animation fan who started this little website as a hobby 10 years ago, and now it’s totally grown above and beyond what I can sometimes manage, especially since it’s still just a hobby that costs me money each month, and I have a full time job and family too. I’m really sorry, it’s depressing me majorly that I can’t figure out how to fix this. :(
Hi,
I’ve tried contacting you via the email form a couple of times, but you never responded, so I’m trying this route instead. There are a bunch of galleries on animationscreencaps.com where a large number of the images are broken — either the thumbnails won’t load, or the full-sized images won’t load, or both. I tried opening my browser’s developer console and then clicking on a broken image, and the console showed a “403 Forbidden” error.
Please look into this. This site is such a great resource, and it would be a shame if it became unusable because of all these broken images.
Hiya, Sorry about that! It’s a confusing issue – I can’t reproduce it here, and it seems to be due to some of my visitors’ IP addresses being blocked by my CDN. I can’t fix or change that, so it’s difficult! As a side note, any time there’s any problem I’ll get 50-80 emails within 24 hours from people saying the same thing. I’m sorry if I don’t have time to reply to you personally – I do read everything, thank you!
I see. So if the visitor’s IP address is the problem, then one possible workaround would be to browse the site through an anonymous proxy server, which masks your real IP address. Of course, some of those proxies may themselves be blocked by your CDN, which means this could ALSO be a way for you to reproduce the issue yourself.
Yep, tried that, and I still couldn’t reproduce it. Hence it still not being fixed yet – I’m a bit baffled and running out of ways to try and troubleshoot this. :/
Well, I obviously don’t have knowledge of your particular situation, but as a software developer myself, allow me to share one of the golden rules of debugging: “when in doubt, check the logs”. Log files are your friends. They can show you exactly which IP addresses are being blocked, and possibly help you figure out a common pattern that they all follow (e.g., all of them might be from the same service provider, or the same geographic region, or the same subdomain, etc.). If you can find that pattern, you can add a rule to your server configuration to explicitly allow IP addresses that match the pattern, and voila — problem solved.
Thanks for the tip – I checked this with my webhost and no IPs are blocked. :/
…Well crud. So much for that idea. I would still suggest consulting the log files, though. They can often reveal things you wouldn’t have thought of. I know the error is a “403 Forbidden” exception, so it’s definitely SOMETHING related to the site’s permissions. But I’m afraid that’s all I can do to help. Good luck!
Micah,
I’ve been emailing for weeks about the screencaps in the Animation and Movie websites. They seem to be glitchy because I can barely upload any screencap from those two websites. I’ve been emailing you to the get the problem resolved, but I have not heard from you so I don’t know if you are fixing the problem or not. If you can email me back or reply to my comment, that would be great. I want to be upload as many screencaps as I can without having any problems and I’m sure other users feel the same way as I do. Please respond to me as soon as you can.
Hiya, I’m aware of this but don’t know how to fix it. The images load fine for me and the majority of visitors, and only a small subset of visitors seem to encounter errors but no one can give me an error message or anything. Since I can’t reproduce it here, I’m totally stuck on how to fix it – I just can’t find a cause. :/ Sorry! I’ll keep looking into it!
Hi! I’m studying film making/cinematography, storytelling, etc. This is an amazing website! Thank you for all your efforts on this! :)
you should state the resolution of your images somewhere on the page. i just purchases the starwars collection hoping the images will be a high enough resolution for my project.
Hello! The images in the zip files are always the same size as the ones freely available – the only difference is the convience of downloading them in 1 zip. So for any gallery, you can always check the size the images will be by viewing the online gallery. :)