Most people first notice SnippingFlow because of the AI step — snap a region, get a written answer. The thing long-term users tell us they would miss more is the history panel. It is a small, scrollable list of every screenshot you have taken recently, with a subject tag and a timestamp, kept entirely in your browser. This post explains what it actually does today, why it lives locally instead of in the cloud, and the small set of workflows it quietly enables.
What the history panel is
Every time you finish a capture — region selected, AI answer returned — the image and the analysis are written to your browser's local storage under the screenshots key. The history view inside the popup is the index over that array: a thumbnail, a label like Screenshot 4 [Computer Science], and the date and time the capture was taken. Click any thumbnail to reopen the full image and the full AI answer in a modal, with the same Copy Text and Open in New Tab buttons you saw the first time around.
Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly open or copy it. There is no cloud sync, no account-bound archive, no server side copy of your screenshots. If you clear your browser data or uninstall the extension, the history is gone. That is by design — see the next section.
Why it is local-only
Screenshots often contain material you do not want a third party holding onto: internal dashboards, customer data, unreleased UI, billing pages, support threads. Cloud-hosted screenshot tools either hash your images server-side (which still means they live on someone else's server) or they lock your history behind an account you can lose access to. SnippingFlow sidesteps both problems by keeping the array in chrome.storage.local, under your browser profile. Your screenshots stay where they always were — on your machine, behind your OS-level permissions.
Subject tags
Each capture is also tagged with a subject category by the same AI pass that produces the analysis. The current categories are mathematics, science, history, language, computer science, and other. The tag shows up next to the screenshot number in the history list. It is not a search field — the panel is just a list — but the tag does make it faster to skim a week of captures and find the one you wanted.
Three workflows the history panel quietly enables
1. Coming back to a useful answer
The AI is good, but it is not always right the first time. Sometimes the better answer is the one you got yesterday for a similar page. The history panel is the only place in SnippingFlow where you can scroll back through your past answers and reopen the modal to copy a snippet you already trusted.
2. Tracking a single dashboard over time
Snap the same Mixpanel or Stripe chart once a week. After a month, the history panel has four thumbnails of the same view. Click them in order, eyeball the trend, and pull the right captures when you need to make a point in a deck. It is not a BI tool, but it answers the "what did this number look like last month?" question in about ten seconds.
3. Re-using a prompt that worked
If you find a prompt that consistently produces a good answer for a certain kind of page — "summarize this in three bullets", "extract the table as CSV", "rewrite the headline in five styles" — the history panel is where you come back to confirm the prompt is still working. Open an old capture, compare the answer side-by-side with a fresh one, and adjust the prompt if the model has drifted.
How much history is kept
The local array is bounded. The extension currently caps the list at the most recent ten captures, regardless of which tier you are on. Older captures fall off the bottom of the list as new ones are added. The cap exists for a boring reason: each screenshot is stored as a base64 data URL inside local storage, and Chrome enforces a per-extension storage quota. Ten full captures comfortably fits within the limit on every browser we have tested.
If you need long-term retention, the current path is to use the Open in New Tab button on the captures you care about and save them yourself. A future release will likely add a manual export to a folder, but it is not in the popup today.
Clearing the history
There is a single "Clear history" button at the bottom of the history view. It deletes the entire array in one shot, after a confirmation prompt. There is no per-row delete yet, so if you only want to remove one capture, your options today are to clear everything or to leave it. The whole operation runs against local storage and takes well under a second.
Try it — install SnippingFlow free, capture and ask right in your browser →