Privacy & security - Snipdeck Docs

Snipdeck is built to keep your screenshots on your machine. Capture and OCR are fully local, and the only two features that touch the network — image uploads and OCR + Translate — are opt-in and clearly scoped. This page is the reference for exactly what stays local, what leaves, and where your data lives on disk.

The short version

Feature	Network?	What is sent
Region capture	No	Nothing — pixels never leave your machine.
OCR indexing	No	Nothing — text is recognized locally and stored in your gallery database.
Gallery, search, floating snips, annotation, collage	No	Nothing.
Launch-at-login	No	Nothing — and no registry write.
Upload (to an image host)	Yes, opt-in	The image, only after you confirm an explicit consent dialog.
OCR + Translate	Yes	Only the OCR-recognized text, to Google’s public translate endpoint.

By default, with Upload and OCR + Translate untouched, Snipdeck makes no network connections at all.

What stays fully local

Capture

Capturing a region is a purely local operation. Snipdeck reads the screen with Windows capture APIs (DXGI Desktop Duplication, with a GDI fallback) and writes the result to your local cache. Nothing about a capture — not the pixels, not the window metadata, not the monitor it came from — is sent anywhere.

OCR indexing

Every snip is OCR-indexed in the background so you can search your screenshots by their text. This runs entirely on your machine using the operating system’s built-in engine, Windows.Media.Ocr.

There is no model download and no network request for OCR.
The recognized text is stored only in your local gallery database (snips.db) and its full-text search index.
OCR is never sent to a server for recognition or indexing.

Note: Windows.Media.Ocr is the same OCR engine that ships with Windows. Snipdeck does not bundle or call any cloud OCR service. See OCR for how indexing and search work.

The gallery and everything in it

Your gallery, search, floating snips, the annotation editor, and the collage editor all operate on local files only. Full-text search runs against the local SQLite database; no query you type is sent off the machine.

Many apps register themselves to start at login by writing a value under the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run registry key. That key is the autostart mechanism antivirus and EDR tools most often flag, because malware abuses it for persistence.

Snipdeck deliberately does not use it. Instead, when you enable launch-at-login, Snipdeck drops an ordinary shortcut (.lnk) into your Startup folder:

shell:Startup

This resolves to:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

This is the same, ordinary, user-visible mechanism Windows itself exposes through Task Manager → Startup apps and File Explorer. It avoids the autostart registry key that security tooling treats as suspicious, and it is fully transparent: you can see the shortcut, and you can delete it yourself to disable autostart.

Tip: To confirm what starts at login, paste shell:Startup into the File Explorer address bar. If Snipdeck’s launch-at-login is enabled, you will see a Snipdeck shortcut there; removing the file disables it, exactly like any other startup app.

Uploads are opt-in

The Upload action (under a snip’s Share menu) sends an image to a public image host so you can share a link. This is the only feature that sends your image pixels off the machine, and it never happens silently.

Nothing is uploaded without consent. Before any upload, Snipdeck shows an explicit consent dialog that names the destination host. Cancel the dialog and nothing leaves your machine.
Public-by-link hosts are not encrypted. The two supported hosts (catbox.moe by default, or Imgur as an opt-in alternative) produce an unlisted URL, but anyone who has that link can open the image, and it is not encrypted in transit at rest by Snipdeck. Treat any uploaded snip as public.
Anonymous catbox.moe uploads cannot be deleted by you afterward. Choose the destination accordingly.

Warning: Do not upload sensitive content — credentials, personal data, anything confidential — to a public-by-link host. Once a link exists, you should assume it can be opened by anyone who obtains it.

The other sharing and export actions stay local except where you direct them: Save writes to disk, Mail hands the image to your mail client as an attachment via Simple MAPI, Share invokes the Windows share sheet, and Open in editor launches the system image editor. Whether those go on to send anything is governed by the app you hand off to, not by Snipdeck.

You can choose the upload host with the upload_service key; see Settings for details.

OCR + Translate uses the network

OCR + Translate reads a snip’s text in another language. To translate, it has to reach a translation service — this is the one place where recognized text leaves your machine.

Snipdeck first runs OCR locally (Windows.Media.Ocr) to recognize the text in the snip.
It then sends only that recognized text to Google’s public translate_a endpoint to be translated.
The image itself is never sent for translation — only the text string.
The translated text is used to populate the translate popup and nowhere else.

Note: OCR + Translate is the only feature that transmits content from a snip beyond an upload you explicitly confirm. If you never open OCR + Translate, no recognized text is ever sent anywhere. The plain OCR + Clipboard action stays fully local — it recognizes text and copies it without any network request.

Where your data lives on disk

All of Snipdeck’s data sits in standard per-user Windows folders. Nothing is stored in a cloud account.

Path	Contents
`%APPDATA%\Snipdeck\settings.json`	Your user settings.
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\Snipdeck\snips.db`	The gallery database (SQLite + full-text search index), including OCR text.
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\Snipdeck\state.json`	Window/session state.
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\Snipdeck\cache\`	Full-resolution snip images and thumbnails.
`%USERPROFILE%\Pictures\Snipdeck\`	Default folder for the Save action.

Because everything is local, removing your data is straightforward: quit Snipdeck and delete the folders above. The cache\ folder together with snips.db holds every captured snip — back them up or wipe them as a set.

Tip: Paste %LOCALAPPDATA%\Snipdeck into the File Explorer address bar to jump straight to your snips, the database, and the cache. See Settings for the full breakdown of each file.

Summary

Capture and OCR are fully local. Nothing is sent for capturing or indexing your screenshots.
Launch-at-login never touches the registry. Snipdeck uses a shell:Startup shortcut you can see and remove.
Uploads are opt-in behind a consent dialog that names the destination, and public-by-link hosts are not encrypted.
OCR + Translate sends only recognized text — never the image — to Google’s public translate endpoint.
Your data stays on your machine in standard per-user folders, with no cloud account involved.