Steps to Capture Facebook
1. To capture Facebook, access the Page Vault Browser, type/paste the Facebook URL in the browser address bar, and press enter on your keyboard.
2. Once the page loads, it is important to log in to Facebook to access all available content. We suggest using an examiner account to prevent your personal information from appearing in the capture. See our help page on creating examiner accounts for more detail.
3. Once you’re logged in, click “Expand.”
4. Under Capture Type you will see two options: Standard and Post by Post.
- Standard: resulting capture will include one PDF of the profile and a second PDF of the posts with expanded comments, if you elect to capture comments.
- Post by Post: resulting capture will include individual PDFs for each post on the profile with comments.
Standard is best for capturing a personal Facebook page. Post by Post is best for large profiles like Facebook groups, companies, and celebrities.
5. Select your desired settings under Capture Options. See sections below for more information on capture settings for Standard and Post by Post.
6. Once you have the Expand settings selected, select the folder where you would like to save the capture. You can also change the default capture name, input a case matter ID, and add notes.
7. Click “Expand and Capture.”
Standard Capture Settings
Under Capture Type, select “Standard.”
Under Capture Options, select one of three options:
- Scroll page only: scroll to load older posts; it will not open comments or capture content; useful for investigations using ctrl F to search for keywords
- Scroll page & capture (no comments): scroll the profile and capture posts
- Scroll page & capture (with comments): scroll the profile and capture posts with comments
Next, you’ll see the “Pixel Limit.” The pixel limit stops the expansion process after a certain number of pixels load to prevent any extremely large profile from crashing the browser. We find that the browser functions best when limiting the expansion to 250,000 pixels at a time.
Note that if you unselect the pixel limit checkbox and the profile is very large, it may take several hours to complete or may even crash the Page Vault Browser.
If you need to capture a very large profile, please see our help page on how to break up large Facebook captures.
Once you have the Expand settings selected, select the folder where you would like to save the capture. You can also change the default capture name, input a case matter ID, and add notes. Then click “Expand and Capture.”
Post by Post Capture Settings
Under Capture Type, select “Post by Post.”
Under Capture Options, select your desired option:
- Email Scrape:
- Scrape only: will scroll through the page and email a list of posts for the Facebook profile. It will not perform any captures
- Scrape and Capture, No Videos: will scroll through the profile and email a list of posts. It will then automatically begin capturing the most recent post from the Facebook profile
- Scrape and Capture, With Videos: will scroll through the profile and email a list of posts. It will then automatically begin capturing the most recent post from the Facebook profile. This option will also capture all available videos in the Facebook profile
- Paste and Capture List of URLs: if you have a list of URLs, you can paste them in the pop-up box that appears to capture. Please note, each URL must be on it’s own line.
NOTE: we do not recommend unselecting “Email scrape.” Post-by-post works by scrolling the entire profile and recording the URL of each individual post on the timeline. Emailing the scrape to you serves as a backup record of the post URLs in the event that you run into an issue.
Next, you’ll see the “Pixel Limit.” The pixel limit stops the expansion process after a certain number of pixels load to prevent any extremely large profile from crashing the browser. In Post-by-Post mode, the default scrape pixel limit is 1,500,000 pixels. 1,500,000 pixels is very large—typically 100+ PDF pages. If you want to limit the amount of comments expanded or attempt to capture more comments on a post, you can edit the number of pixels.
Once you have the Expand settings selected, select the folder where you would like to save the capture. You can also change the default capture name, input a case matter ID, and add notes. Then click “Expand and Capture.”
If you would like to combine all PDFs captured using Post by Post into a single PDF, you can do so by selecting “Merge” when you export your captures from the Portal. See our help page on exporting captures for further instruction.
For more detail and FAQ’s on using Post by Post, please see our Post by Post help page.