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Getting Started

Quick start

Take your first snip in under a minute and learn what happens to it, from the floating window to the gallery.

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 hundreds of times.

Note: Snipdeck is Windows-only today (Windows 10 and 11). Make sure it’s installed and running first — see Installation. When it’s running, you’ll see its icon in the system tray.

Take your first snip

The core gesture is a held modifier plus a drag:

  1. Hold down the Win key.
  2. While holding Win, press and hold the left mouse button and drag a rectangle over the area you want to capture.
  3. Release the mouse button.

That’s it. You just took a snip.

Tip: You don’t need to open Snipdeck’s window first or press a shortcut to “arm” anything. As long as Snipdeck is running in the tray, the Win + drag gesture is always live.

If you’d rather not hold Win, right-click the tray icon and choose New Snip to arm a one-shot drag capture — the next drag becomes a snip without any modifier held.

What happens to the result

With a plain Win + drag, the captured region does two things:

  • It’s saved into the gallery (Snipdeck’s searchable grid of every snip you’ve taken).
  • It appears immediately as a floating snip — a small, borderless, always-on-top window sitting right where you drew the selection.

The modifiers you hold during the drag decide what happens to the result. The plain gesture gives you a floating snip; adding Ctrl, Alt, or Shift routes it to the clipboard, the gallery only, or both. Here’s the short version:

ShortcutResult
Win + dragFloating snip on screen
Win+Ctrl + dragFloating snip and copy to clipboard
Win+Alt + dragClipboard only (not added to the gallery)
Win+Shift + dragGallery only (no floating window)
Win+Ctrl+Shift + dragGallery and clipboard, no floating window
Win+Shift+Space, then dragFreeze-first — freeze the screen, then select on the still image

For your first run, stick with plain Win + drag so you can see the floating snip. The full matrix is explained in Capture shortcuts.

Tip: Some interfaces disappear the moment you move the mouse — hover tooltips, open menus, drag previews. To capture those, use freeze-first capture: press Win+Shift+Space to dim and freeze the whole screen, then drag your selection on the frozen still image.

The floating snip

After a plain Win + drag, your capture stays pinned on top of every other window as a lightweight floating snip. It’s not a regular app window — it has no title bar and no chrome, just your image floating on the desktop. You can:

  • Drag it anywhere by grabbing the image.
  • Resize it from its edges.
  • Pin it so it stays on top, crop it inward, or rotate / flip it.
  • Dismiss it when you’re done.

Floating snips are handy for keeping a reference visible while you work in another app — a design, a code snippet, a chat message — without alt-tabbing back and forth. They keep living independently of Snipdeck’s main window. To learn every gesture and handle, see Floating snips.

Right-click actions

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

ActionWhat it does
CopyCopy the image to the clipboard
OCR + ClipboardRecognize the text in the image and copy it
OCR + TranslateOpen the translate popup for the snip’s text
AnnotateOpen the annotation editor (pen, shapes, arrows, text)
ShareWindows share sheet, Mail (MAPI attachment), open in the system editor (Paint), or Upload to an image host
TransformRotate 90° / 180°, flip horizontal / vertical
Crop / ResizeTrim by dragging handles inward, or change the size
Hide from screen / DeleteRemove the floating window, or delete the snip

Note: Hide from screen only dismisses the floating window — the snip stays in your gallery. Delete removes the snip itself.

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 inline — see OCR translate.
  • Annotate opens a focused editor for markup — see Annotation editor.
  • Share can send the image out of Snipdeck. Uploads are opt-in and prompt you with an explicit consent dialog first — see Sharing and export.

Every snip you take (unless you used a clipboard-only shortcut like Win+Alt) lands in the gallery — Snipdeck’s dense, scrollable grid of thumbnails. Open it from the system tray icon.

In the gallery you can search across everything Snipdeck knows about each snip: the OCR’d text inside the image, the window it came from, the monitor, and the file path. Because OCR runs automatically, you can often find a screenshot just by typing a word you remember seeing in it — not just by its name.

You can also filter by status, content, size, and date, and the grid stays smooth even at thousands of snips. For the full set of search and filter tools, see Gallery and search.

Tip: Took a snip and lost track of the floating window? Don’t worry — it’s already in the gallery. Open the gallery and it’ll be the most recent thumbnail.

Where your snips live

Snipdeck stores its data in standard per-user folders. You generally don’t need to touch these, but it helps to know where things are:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Snipdeck\   → snips.db, state.json, and the cache\ of images + thumbnails
Pictures\Snipdeck\          → default folder when you choose Save
%APPDATA%\Snipdeck\settings.json → your settings

Recap

The whole loop, start to finish:

  1. Hold Win and drag a region with the left mouse button.
  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 — search by the text inside it.

Next steps