You've been trying to screenshot a dropdown for the last five minutes. Every time you reach for Print Screen, the menu snaps shut. Every time you Alt-Tab into a screenshot tool, the tooltip you needed disappears. This is the moment every designer knows, and no native screenshot tool has ever really solved it — the states you most need to review are the ones that vanish the moment you try to capture them.
Pxlify is a Chrome extension we built to fix exactly that. It freezes any page mid-interaction — dropdowns, tooltips, autocompletes, hover popovers, focus rings — then lets you annotate directly on the frozen pixel and share the whole thing as a link. Here is the full loop, captured live on TradingView.
That whole clip is one continuous flow. What used to be a Slack thread of 'the icon next to the third item in the dropdown' becomes a real artifact your team can open and reply on — with the dropdown still open.
How the freeze actually works
The whole trick is Capture Delay. You turn it on in the extension popup, and instead of grabbing a screenshot the instant you click, Pxlify starts a countdown — usually three seconds. That is your window to hover into the state you want. When the timer hits zero, the entire page freezes exactly as it is.
Nothing on the page is live anymore. The dropdown you hovered into stays open forever. You draw a region around it, and the annotation overlay opens right on top.
The eight steps, if you want the map
| # | Action | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enable Capture Delay | Extension popup toggle |
| 2 | Click Selected Region | Extension popup · countdown starts |
| 3 | Hover into the state you want | The live page |
| 4 | Page freezes · draw a region | Frozen page overlay |
| 5 | Add arrows, circles, highlights | Annotation toolbar |
| 6 | Click Generate Link | Opens screenshot in a new tab |
| 7 | Add a comment on the annotation | Screenshot viewer |
| 8 | Share · copy Anyone-with-link URL | Top header of viewer |
Three seconds handles most menus. For deeper nested UI — sub-menus, delayed tooltips — bump the delay to five.
Marking up the frozen pixel
Once you draw the region, the annotation overlay drops arrows, circles, and highlights onto the pixel. In the video, we placed two arrows on the icons we wanted redesigned. When it looks right, one click on Generate Link uploads everything to Pxlify's CDN and opens the screenshot in a new tab.
Sharing, and getting replies back on the pixel
That new tab is the screenshot viewer — the same place your teammates will land when they open your link. You can pin a comment right on the annotation. Then Share in the top header, access defaulted to Anyone with link, copy the URL, paste it into Slack or Linear. No sign-up wall on the way in. Teammates open it, add their own annotations, and thread replies right on the frozen state.
Where each control lives
- Capture Delay toggle — Chrome extension popup, top of the panel.
- Selected Region button — same popup, right under Capture Delay.
- Annotation tools (arrow, circle, highlight) — overlay that opens after the freeze.
- Generate Link — bottom-right of the annotation overlay.
- Comments — left panel of the screenshot viewer.
- Share + access control — top header of the viewer, defaults to Anyone with link.
That's the whole thing. It works on any web app — Linear, Notion, Figma, TradingView, your own product's admin panel. The promise is small and specific: if you can hover it, you can review it. In one place, on the pixel, with the whole team.