When we surveyed long-term SnippingFlow users about which feature they would miss most if the extension disappeared tomorrow, the answer was not the AI. It was not the stealth mode. It was the history panel — the small, scrollable list of every screenshot you have ever taken, with timestamps, kept locally in your browser. This post explains what it does, why it is built that way, and the workflows it quietly enables.
What the history panel actually is
Every time you capture a region with SnippingFlow, the image and the AI answer are saved into your browser's local storage. The history view in the popup is the index over that storage: a thumbnail, a timestamp, and the first line of your prompt. Click any thumbnail to see the full capture and the full answer.
Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly export or share it. There is no cloud sync, no account-bound history, no server keeping a copy of your screenshots. If you clear your browser storage, the history is gone. That is by design.
Why it is local-only
Screenshots often contain sensitive material — internal dashboards, customer data, unreleased UI, billing pages. Most cloud screenshot tools either hash your images server-side (which still means they live on a third-party server) or they lock your history behind an account (which means losing access if you change email). Local-only history sidesteps both problems. Your screenshots stay where they always were: on your machine, under your browser profile.
Three workflows the history panel quietly enables
1. Comparing snapshots over time
Snap your own dashboard once a week. Three months in, you have twelve thumbnails of the same chart. Scroll through the history, eyeball the trend, and pull the right ones when you need to make a point in a deck. This is faster than any BI tool for the "what did this number look like in March?" question.
2. Re-running the same prompt on a new capture
If you find a prompt that works well — "extract the table as CSV", "summarize this in three bullets" — the history panel makes it trivial to re-run it on a fresh capture of a similar page. Snap, paste the prompt from your notes, get the answer.
3. Auditing what you actually looked at
Some users run SnippingFlow as a soft time-tracking layer. They scroll back through the history at the end of the day and see which dashboards, which competitor pages, which error messages they hit. It is not perfect analytics, but it surfaces patterns you would otherwise miss.
Tiers and retention
The free tier keeps the last 20 captures. Pro and Premium lift the cap. If you are a power user and you want months of searchable history, that is the upgrade you are paying for — not extra AI capacity, but a deeper local archive. Premium also unlocks one-click export of the entire history as a zip, which is useful if you want to back it up before clearing your browser.
Clearing the history
There is a single "Clear history" button at the bottom of the history view. It deletes everything in one shot, with a confirmation prompt. There is no per-item delete in the current version, so if you only want to remove one capture, your options are to clear all of it or to leave it. We are considering a per-row delete for a future release.
See the history panel in action — install SnippingFlow free →