Snipdeck Beta Snip it, keep it on top, find it by its text.

Hold Win on Windows, or Super and Alt on GNOME, and drag a region: the snip stays on screen as a floating window, its text is recognised on your device, and it lands in a searchable gallery. Free and open source.

Download Quick start
Platform
Windows 10 / 11 · Linux, x64
Version
0.3.0
License
MIT
Interface languages
23
Source code on GitHub

Hold, drag, choose where it goes

Hold Win on Windows, or Super Alt on GNOME, and drag a region; on KDE Plasma, sway and Hyprland, use the hotkeys. The modifier you add decides where the snip goes.

Hold Win and drag with the left mouse button.

Win + drag
Floating snip on screen
On screen: yes
Clipboard: no
Gallery: yes
Win + Ctrl + drag
Floating snip and clipboard
On screen: yes
Clipboard: yes
Gallery: yes
Win + Alt + drag
Clipboard only
On screen: no
Clipboard: yes
Gallery: no
Win + Shift + drag
Gallery only
On screen: no
Clipboard: no
Gallery: yes
Win + Ctrl + Shift + drag
Gallery and clipboard, no window
On screen: no
Clipboard: yes
Gallery: yes
Win + Shift + Space then drag
Freeze first, then select The screen freezes and you select on the still image, so hover-only tooltips are captured too.

For a single snip without holding a key, right-click the tray icon and choose New Snip, or press Ctrl Alt Shift A.

Capture shortcuts in the docs

After the snip

Floating snips
A snip becomes a borderless window that stays above the others. Drag, resize, pin, crop or rotate it. On GNOME, the bundled shell extension makes this possible.
Annotation and collage
Pen, highlighter, shapes, arrows and text; undo and redo. Lay several snips out as one image in a grid, rows or masonry.
Text recognition and translation
Each snip’s text is recognised on your device: by Windows’ own OCR engine (Windows.Media.Ocr), or by Tesseract on Linux. Translate the recognised text into any of 29 languages.
Gallery
Full-text search over OCR text, window title, monitor and path; filter by status, content, size and date. Ctrl F jumps to search.
Light on resources
A native app written in Rust, its interface drawn with Slint: no browser engine inside, no runtime to install. About 68 MB of memory with the gallery open; next to no CPU while it waits in the tray (0.05 %). How it was measured

Screens

From the app itself, with made-up content. The screenshots follow the page’s language and theme.

The Snipdeck gallery holding ten snips; two of them float on the desktop, above the other windows. The Snipdeck gallery holding ten snips; two of them float on the desktop, above the other windows.

Every snip collects in one place

Each snip you take joins the gallery, searchable by window title, date and recognised text. The ones you keep on screen are marked on screen.

What leaves your device

Capture, text recognition and gallery search use no network. Two actions do, and you start both of them.

Privacy and security in the docs
Capture and OCR
Nothing; both run on your device.
Translation
Only the recognised text, only when you ask, to Google’s public translate endpoint. The image is never sent.
Upload
It asks first, every time. The destination is catbox.moe, Imgur or a server of your own added from a ShareX .sxcu file.
Launch at login
A plain shortcut in shell:Startup on Windows, an XDG autostart entry on Linux; nothing written to the registry. Snipdeck starts in the tray.

Download

One .exe for Windows; for Linux, a .deb, an .rpm or an archive that needs no root. No account. Version 0.3.0 is a beta.

Download

File snipdeck-windows-x64.exe

Windows
Windows 10 or 11, x64: snipdeck-windows-x64.exe; one file, no installer
Linux
x64, glibc 2.30 or later: .deb (Debian, Ubuntu), .rpm (Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE), or snipdeck-linux-x64.tar.gz with install.sh
From source
cargo build --release with Rust (stable)

Good to know

Linux desktops
On GNOME with the shell extension, on KDE Plasma with the KWin script, and on X11 desktops by themselves, snips open where they were captured and stay on top. On sway and Hyprland a snip floats, but opens where the compositor puts it. The Super and Alt drag is GNOME-only; the Linux build is a beta.
macOS
Not yet; there is no date.
Settings
What changes often is in the gallery’s ⋯ menu; the rest lives in a JSON file you edit before restarting Snipdeck.
Configuration in the docs

Frequently asked questions

All questions
Does it work offline?

Mostly, yes. Capture, OCR (text indexing and OCR + Clipboard), the gallery and search all run with no network at all. Two features reach the network: OCR + Translate, which sends the recognised text to a translation endpoint, and uploads, which ask first every time. On Windows OCR uses the built-in Windows.Media.Ocr engine; on Linux, Tesseract and the language data you install.

Which Linux desktops does it run on?

On every Linux desktop, capture, shortcuts, OCR, the gallery and the right-click menu work. Opening a snip where it was captured, keeping it above other windows and the Super and Alt drag come with the bundled shell extension on GNOME; Wayland does not let an application do these for itself.

Where are my snips stored?

In your user profile. On Windows the database and image cache live under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Snipdeck\, settings in %APPDATA%\Snipdeck\settings.json; on Linux, ~/.local/share/Snipdeck/ and ~/.config/Snipdeck/settings.json. Snips are kept as lossless WebP.

Can I upload to my own server?

Yes. In the gallery’s ⋯ menu, choose Upload to › Add from a .sxcu file… and pick a ShareX custom uploader — the format Zipline, XBackBone, Chevereto and similar servers offer. A file that needs something Snipdeck cannot send is refused at import, with the reason.

Snipdeck docs

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