Troubleshooting

Lens reports failures where it can — an in-page toast when a content script can run, and the toolbar icon badge when one cannot.

1. This page cannot be captured

Chrome forbids extensions from running on some pages, and no extension can work around it.

• chrome:// and about: pages, including New Tab and Settings
• The Chrome Web Store
• devtools:// and view-source: pages
• Other extensions' pages
• The built-in PDF viewer
• file:// URLs, unless you enable Allow access to file URLs for Lens on chrome://extensions

On these pages the toolbar icon shows a red ! with the reason in its tooltip, because a toast cannot be drawn.

2. The recording came out blank

Tab capture succeeds on protected video but returns solid black — sites using DRM, such as YouTube and Netflix, are excluded from capture by design. Lens samples the recorded frames and warns you when they look blank, but still opens the converter so you can judge for yourself.

If a whole page records black, the page is blocking capture. If only a video player area is black, that player is protected and the rest of the page is fine.

3. Captures are going to Downloads instead of my folder

Folder access has lapsed. Open the popup: the folder row shows access lost and a Reconnect button. One click fixes it.

This happens because re-granting folder access requires a click, and the extension's background worker never has one — so it cannot recover on its own. See Projects and folders.

4. A capture saved but is not in the timeline

The file was written but project_metadata.json could not be updated. The save toast says so explicitly. Two causes:

• Write metadata file is switched off in Settings — turn it back on.
• The metadata file could not be written, usually a permission problem on the folder. Reconnect the folder.

5. "No frames were captured"

The recording produced nothing to encode. Usually the tab was hidden or minimised for the whole recording — tab capture samples what is being drawn, and a tab that is not being drawn produces nothing. Check the tab stayed visible and record again.

6. My guide is not in the folder

A guide is written when you approve it on the save screen. If no folder was linked at that moment it is held in the browser instead and listed under Dashboard > Guides as pending. Link a folder, make that project active, and write it from there — nothing is lost in the meantime.

7. My guides have disappeared from the dashboard

The files are almost certainly still there. A guide is listed because project_metadata.json names it, so a metadata file that was lost, replaced or hand-edited takes every guide in that project out of the list while the folders sit untouched on disk.

Dashboard > Guides > Find guides on disk walks every linked project and lists whatever is missing, keeping each guide's own id. The same action picks up a guide folder you copied in by hand, which is otherwise invisible for the same reason.

8. A dropdown step will not move on

That is deliberate. Opening a dropdown is not choosing from it, so the step waits for the option the guide recorded — the panel names which one. Pick something else and the step stays put and tells you what to look for. Where the list is drawn in the page, the option itself is ringed; where the operating system draws it, as with a plain <select> on macOS, there is nothing in the page to ring and the tag names it instead.

Next moves on regardless, if you want to skip it.

9. Guide Mode is not highlighting anything

Look at the label beside the step number in the panel.

• Not on this page — the control could not be found. Either you are not on the page that step is about, or the page has changed since the guide was recorded. Lens keeps looking, so if the control is behind a menu, opening that menu will ring it.
• Nothing at all — that step has no control to point at. A page load and a scroll are instructions to follow, not things to click; press Next when you have done it.
• Plain walkthrough — the guide was recorded with Walkthrough mode set to Plain, so nothing was written down about the page's controls. Guides recorded that way show their words and pictures only. Re-record with Interactive to get the highlighting.

10. My GIF came out blurry or soft

The converter's Quality / scale control was below 100%. At 75% or 50% every captured pixel is resampled, which softens text first. Re-encode from the converter at 100%, and raise the framerate to 30 if motion also looked choppy — see Getting the highest-quality GIF on the Recording page.

If the recording itself looked soft on screen, the region was captured on a scaled display. Recording at 100% scale keeps whatever the tab actually rendered; it cannot add detail that was never drawn.

11. Do I need an account or a subscription?

No. Lens has no account, no sign-in and no subscription, and it does not check a licence at any point. Everything on these pages works offline. The one optional exception is a cloud AI provider you connect with your own key — that is your account with that provider, not one with Vectored.

12. The MP4 I recorded is a WebM

Your Chrome build cannot encode MP4. Lens falls back to WebM and names the file for what it actually wrote, rather than giving you an .mp4 that is not one. The Settings page says which format your browser will produce. Updating Chrome usually resolves it.

13. Nothing happened when I pressed the shortcut

See Keyboard shortcuts — the usual causes are a restricted page, a conflicting binding, or a page that has not finished loading.

14. Still stuck

Open a support ticket and include what you were capturing, which browser version you are on, and what the toast or tooltip said. No account is needed.