Quick start

This page walks you through your very first capture: how to grab a region, what appears on screen, what you can do with it, and where to find it again. By the end you’ll have a snip on your desktop and know the basic loop you’ll repeat every day.

Take your first snip

The core gesture is a held modifier plus a drag. Which modifier depends on the platform:

On Windows or GNOME:

1. Hold down the modifier (Win, or Super+Alt).
2. Without letting go, press and hold the left mouse button and drag a rectangle over the area you want to capture.
3. Release the mouse button.

You just took a snip. Esc cancels a capture while you drag.

If you’d rather not hold a modifier, right-click the tray icon and choose New Snip, or click New in the gallery. On Windows, the next drag becomes a snip without any modifier held. On Linux, the screen freezes first and you select the region on the still image.

What happens to the result

With the plain gesture (Win + drag, or Super+Alt + drag), the captured region does two things:

• It’s saved into the gallery, the searchable grid of every snip you’ve taken.
• It appears immediately as a floating snip: a small, borderless window that stays above other windows. On Windows and on GNOME with the extension, it opens right where you drew the selection.

The extra modifiers you hold during the drag decide what happens to the result. Ctrl also copies it to the clipboard; Shift saves it to the gallery only, with no floating window. Here’s the short version:

For your first run, stick with the plain gesture so you can see the floating snip. The full matrix and the hotkeys are on Capture shortcuts.

The floating snip

After a plain gesture, your capture becomes a lightweight floating snip that stays above other windows. It’s not a regular app window: it has no title bar and no frame, just your image on the desktop. You can:

• Drag it anywhere by grabbing the image.
• Resize it with the corner handles.
• Pin it, crop it by dragging the edges inward, or rotate / flip it.
• Hide it from the screen when you’re done.

Floating snips are for keeping a reference visible (a design, a code snippet, a chat message) while you work in another app. They live independently of Snipdeck’s main window. For the details, see Floating snips.

Right-click actions

Right-click the floating snip (or any card in the gallery) to open its action menu. The same menu works in both places:

Hide from screen only dismisses the floating window; the snip stays in your gallery. Delete removes the snip itself, permanently.

A few of these deserve a closer look once you’re comfortable:

• OCR turns the picture into selectable, searchable text. Every snip is OCR-indexed in the background automatically; see OCR.
• OCR + Translate reads the snip’s text in another language; see OCR + translate.
• Annotate opens a focused editor for markup; see Annotation editor.
• Share can send the image out of Snipdeck. Every upload shows an explicit consent window first; see Sharing and export.

Find it later in the gallery

Every snip you take (except clipboard-only captures) lands in the gallery. Bring it up from the tray icon, with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G, or on Linux by opening Snipdeck again from the applications menu.

In the gallery you can search across everything Snipdeck knows about each snip: the OCR text inside the image, the window it came from, the monitor, and the file path. Press Ctrl+F to jump to the search box. Because OCR runs automatically, you can find a screenshot by typing a word you remember seeing in it.

The Filter button narrows by status, content, size, and date. For the full set of search and filter tools, see Gallery and search.

Where your snips live

Snipdeck keeps its data in standard per-user folders. You generally don’t need to touch them:

Recap

The whole loop, start to finish:

1. Hold Win (Windows) or Super+Alt (GNOME) and drag a region with the left mouse button; on other desktops, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A.
2. A floating snip appears, and the capture is saved to the gallery.
3. Right-click the snip to copy, OCR, annotate, share, transform, or delete it.
4. Find it any time in the gallery by searching for the text inside it.

Next steps

• Capture shortcuts: the full modifier matrix, freeze-first capture, and the hotkeys.
• Floating snips: everything you can do with the on-top windows.
• Gallery and search: the toolbar, full-text search, and filters.
• Keyboard shortcuts: every key, in one place.