Every capture goes into the active project. A project is a name and, optionally, a folder on your machine that Lens has been granted access to.
1. Creating a project
- Press New project in the popup, or New project on the dashboard both open the same flow.
- Give it a name this is what appears in the project dropdown and in project_metadata.json.
- Pick a folder Chrome asks for read/write access to that one folder.
2. What Lens writes into the folder
- The capture files themselves — .png, .jpg, .gif, .mp4 or .webm.
- project_metadata.json — a timeline entry per capture recording the file name, page title, page URL, timestamp, the captured region and your note.
The metadata file is plain JSON and is meant to be read by other tools. Every entry and the file itself carry "createdBy": "Lens by Vectored".
3. Switching the active project
Use the dropdown at the top of the popup. Only the active project receives new captures; the others keep their files and history untouched.
4. When folder access is lost
Chrome does not keep folder permission forever. After a browser restart or an extension reload it can lapse, and the extension's background worker is not allowed to ask for it back on its own.
When that happens the popup shows access lost next to the folder name and the button changes to Reconnect. One click restores it. The dashboard shows the same state on the project card.
While access is lost, captures do not fail — they fall back to the Downloads folder under Lens-Captures/, and the save toast says so. They still appear in the timeline, so nothing is silently dropped, but they are not in your project folder until you move them.
5. Deleting a project
Delete a project from the dashboard's project card. This removes it from Lens only — files already written to disk are left alone. The default project is protected and cannot be deleted.