A still capture is one screen after the selection: the picture, the tools that change it, and the name it will be saved under are all in front of you at once. Nothing is written until you press Save.
1. Selecting the region
Start a capture from the popup's Capture region button or the keyboard shortcut. The page dims, and the region you drag stays bright.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Draw a region | Click and drag anywhere on the page |
| Resize | Drag any of the eight handles on the selection edge |
| Move | Drag from inside the selection |
| Confirm | Press Capture Image, or press Enter |
| Cancel | Press Cancel, or press Escape |
The pill above the selection shows the size in CSS pixels and the native pixel size you will actually get — on a Retina display a 600×400 selection is captured at 1200×800.
2. Capturing a hover state or an open menu
A hover, a dropdown and a pop-up menu all close the moment you click anywhere else — including on the Capture Image button — so on their own they can never be photographed. The delay beside that button solves it: choose 3s, 5s, 10s or 30s and Lens hands the page back to you for that long before the shutter fires.
- Drag the region over the area the menu or tooltip will appear in, not over the control that opens it.
- Pick a delay from the clock menu on the left of the capture toolbar.
- Press Capture Image the toolbar controls disappear, the region stays outlined, and the count starts.
- Set the page up hover the control, open the menu, focus the field. Clicks, hovers and scrolling all reach the page normally.
- Wait the capture is taken automatically when the count reaches zero.
The count runs in the capture toolbar, in the place the delay was chosen, so nothing new appears on the page to get in the way. Cancel or Escape calls it off and gives the selection back, still adjustable. The choice is remembered for the rest of the session, so a run of captures that all need the same pause only needs setting once.
Native dropdowns — a plain <select> — are drawn by the operating system rather than by the page, so Chrome cannot photograph them and they will not appear. Menus, tooltips, hover states and focus rings built in HTML and CSS, which is the great majority, all capture normally.
The region is fixed to the screen, not to the page. If you scroll during the delay, the capture takes whatever has moved under the box.
3. Capture full tab
Full tab skips the selection step and captures the whole visible area of the tab. It does not capture below the fold — only what is on screen.
4. The private-data check
As the save screen opens, Lens looks over the region it just captured for things that usually should not be shared, and shows a bar above the image listing what it found. Each one is outlined on the image so you can see exactly what would be covered.
It looks for password fields, fields named for a credential that have something in them, and text shaped like an API key, a JWT, a bearer token or a PEM private key. Unless you turn it off, it also flags email addresses and card numbers — card numbers are checksum-checked, so an order number is not mistaken for one.
- Tick or untick anything in the list, then press Blur selected to cover the ticked ones in a single step that a single Undo reverses.
- Dismiss hides the bar and changes nothing.
- High-confidence findings are ticked for you; the rest are listed but left unticked.
The check runs on the structure of the page in your own browser. It uses no AI and sends nothing anywhere, and it is on by default. If you have connected an AI provider you can additionally let a model sort real credentials from documentation examples — see Settings.
Treat it as a safety net, not a guarantee. It recognises known shapes, so it will not catch a secret that does not look like one, or a name or figure that is sensitive only in context. Read the capture as well.
5. The save screen
Confirming the selection opens the editor and the save form as a single screen. Down the left is a rail of tools, in the middle the picture, and on the right the panel for whichever tool is selected — with the file name and notes below it.
The rail has two halves. Above the divider are marks you add on top of the picture; below it are changes to the picture itself.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pen | Freehand drawing. Hold Shift to constrain the line |
| Text | Click where the label goes, then type |
| Box | Drag a rectangle. Shift keeps it square |
| Circle | Drag an ellipse. Shift keeps it round |
| Arrow | Drag from the tail to the point |
| Blur | Pixelate a region — rewritten into the image data, not drawn over it |
| Crop | Trim the picture to a region or a fixed ratio |
| Adjust | Brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure and warmth, plus Auto |
| Turn | Rotate left or right, flip across or down |
Style — colour, size and font — sits in the panel and applies to the next mark you make. Everything you add is listed under Marks in the order you made it, with blurs tagged permanent, so three edits later you can still see at a glance that a blur is in place.
6. Cropping, adjusting and turning
- Crop opens on the whole picture — easier to pull inward than an empty box is to place. Ratio chips offer Free, Original, 1:1, 16:9, 4:3 and 3:2, and the readout shows the real pixel size you will get. Apply crop commits it.
- Adjust previews live against the picture as it was when you opened the tool, so dragging a slider back to the middle returns the exact original pixels rather than an approximation. Auto stretches the histogram to use the full range.
- Turn applies immediately — each rotation or flip is one step that Undo reverses.
Cropping or turning retires the private-data bar, because the regions it flagged no longer line up with the picture. Anything still sensitive is covered with the blur tool instead.
7. Undoing
⌘Z (Ctrl+Z), or the Undo button under the picture. It steps back through everything — marks, crops, rotations and adjustments alike — restoring the size of the picture as well as its pixels, and taking the mark back off the list.
Escape works inward-out. In Crop, Adjust or Turn it leaves that tool. On a picture you have not drawn on, it closes the save screen. It will not throw away work you have done: undo that first, deliberately.
Blur is irreversible and that is the point. It rewrites the underlying pixels rather than covering them, so the original cannot be recovered from the saved file by removing a layer. Undo reverses a blur only while the save screen is still open — once the file is written, what was covered is gone.
8. Naming and saving
Below the tools are the file name, an optional note, and the page title and URL that will be recorded alongside the capture.
- The name is prefilled from your file name pattern — see Settings.
- The note is stored in project_metadata.json for that capture. Use it for context a file name cannot carry.
- Save to project (⌘S) writes the file. The footer says which project it is going to before you press it, and a toast afterwards says where it actually landed.
- Copy image puts it on the clipboard instead of saving.
If you have connected an AI provider, a Suggest name button appears above the name field. It reads the text inside the region you captured and fills in a file name and a one-line description of what the screenshot shows. The description is added to your note rather than replacing it, and everything it writes is yours to edit.
This is the one still-capture feature that sends the region's text to your provider, because describing a screenshot is the task. It only ever runs when you press the button — never as part of saving. If your provider is the browser's built-in model or one on your own machine, that text does not leave the device either way.
The toast tells you the truth about where the file landed. If it says Downloaded to Downloads, the project folder was unavailable and the reason is in the message — most often folder access needs reconnecting.