Privacy and security

Snipdeck is built to keep your screenshots on your machine. Capture and OCR run locally on Windows and Linux. The two features that use the network, uploads and OCR + Translate, ask before they send anything. This page is the reference for what stays local, what leaves, and where your data lives on disk.

The short version

If you never upload and never use OCR + Translate, Snipdeck makes no network connections. The only other exception is a link you click yourself, such as the website link in About Snipdeck, which opens in your browser.

What stays local

Capture

Capturing a region never leaves your machine. How Snipdeck reads the screen depends on the platform:

• Windows reads the monitor with DXGI Desktop Duplication, falling back to GDI.
• Linux on Wayland reads the screen through the desktop’s ScreenCast portal. You grant access once; the screen-sharing indicator shows only for the moment a snip is taken.
• GNOME with the Snipdeck extension: a Super+Alt+drag snip is taken by GNOME Shell’s own screenshot code inside the extension and handed to Snipdeck over the session bus. No portal is involved.

OCR

Every snip is OCR-indexed in the background so you can search it by its text. This runs on your machine:

• Windows uses the built-in Windows.Media.Ocr engine. There is no model to download.
• Linux uses the tesseract program installed on your system. The image is fed to it through a pipe, not written to a temporary file. Without tesseract, OCR is skipped.

The recognized text is stored only in your gallery database (snips.db).

The gallery and everything in it

The gallery, search, floating snips, the annotation editor and the collage editor work on local files only. Search runs against the local SQLite database; nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Copies handed to other programs

Email and Open in the system image editor need a file to open, so Snipdeck writes a copy into a folder only you can read: %TEMP%\Snipdeck on Windows, a private folder under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR on Linux. Old copies are deleted at the next hand-over, and on Linux the runtime folder is cleared when you log out.

Logs

Snipdeck’s log does not record where your pointer was or the titles of your windows, except at debug level, which you have to turn on yourself.

Uploads ask first, every time

Upload is the only feature that sends your image off the machine. It never starts on its own:

• Nothing is sent until you press Upload. Every upload opens Snipdeck’s upload window first. It names the host and the address the image goes to. Cancel sends nothing.
• The window says what the upload means: anyone with the link can open the image; catbox.moe and Imgur do not list it anywhere; a catbox.moe upload cannot be deleted later; a server whose address starts with http:// sends the image unencrypted.
• Imported hosts keep their keys in plain text. If you add your own server from a ShareX .sxcu file, any API key in it is kept in settings.json, as ShareX keeps it.

Choose the host from ⋯ → Upload to. See Sharing and export for the upload window and for adding your own server.

OCR + Translate asks once

OCR + Translate shows a snip’s text in another language. It is the one place where recognized text leaves your machine.

• OCR runs locally first.
• The first time you use it, Snipdeck explains that the recognized text goes to Google Translate and waits for your yes. Your answer is remembered as translate_consented in settings.json; set it back to false to be asked again.
• Only the text is sent, over HTTPS to translate.googleapis.com, in the request body rather than the URL. The image is never sent.

OCR + Clipboard never uses the network.

Launch at login without the registry

Many Windows apps start at login by writing a value under the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run registry key. Security tools flag that key often, because malware uses it to persist.

Snipdeck uses ordinary, visible files instead:

Turn it on or off with Launch at Login in the ⋯ menu or the tray menu, or delete the file yourself. A login start runs Snipdeck with --autostart, so it waits in the tray instead of opening a window.

Where your data lives

Everything sits in your own user folders. There is no cloud account.

To remove your data, quit Snipdeck and delete these folders. On Linux, ./install.sh --uninstall removes the program but leaves your snips in ~/.local/share/Snipdeck, so delete that folder too if you want them gone. See Settings for each file.

Summary

• Capture and OCR are local on both platforms.
• Uploads ask every time, in a window that names the host and says what the upload means.
• OCR + Translate asks once and sends only the recognized text, never the image.
• Launch at login is a plain file you can see and delete: a Startup shortcut on Windows, an autostart entry on Linux.
• Your data stays in your user folders, with no cloud account.

See also

• Settings: file locations and every settings.json key
• OCR: local text recognition and indexing
• OCR + Translate: the feature that sends recognized text
• Sharing and export: the upload window and your own server