How to use CaptureFlow

Install

CaptureFlow runs in any Chromium browser on Manifest V3 — Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc and Vivaldi. Grab it from the download page, then pin it: click the puzzle-piece icon in your toolbar and hit the pin next to CaptureFlow. Everything below assumes the icon is visible.

Your first capture

1. Open any web page.
2. Click the CaptureFlow icon. The popup opens on the Screenshot tab.
3. Choose Visible Part.
4. The editor opens in a new tab with your screenshot already loaded.
5. Draw an arrow, then press Download.

That is the whole loop. Once it feels familiar, skip the popup entirely and use Ctrl+Shift+1.

Capture modes

Visible part

Captures exactly what is inside the browser viewport. Fastest mode, and the one you will use most. High-DPI displays are handled correctly, so a screenshot taken at 150% Windows scaling comes out sharp rather than soft.

Selected area

The page dims and your cursor becomes a crosshair. Drag a rectangle over the part you want; a live label shows the exact pixel dimensions as you drag. Release to capture. Press Esc at any point to cancel without capturing.

Tip: the selection is taken from the visible viewport, so scroll to what you want before starting the region capture.

Full page

CaptureFlow measures the full scroll height, then steps down the page one viewport at a time, pausing briefly at each step so lazy-loaded images have a chance to appear. Sticky and fixed headers are hidden after the first frame so they do not repeat down the image, then restored when the capture finishes.

Two things worth knowing:

• Very tall pages are capped at 32,000 pixels — a browser canvas limit, not ours. You will be warned if the page was truncated.
• Infinite-scroll feeds capture whatever has loaded and then stop. They will not scroll forever.

Delayed capture

Choose Visible Part after Delay for a 3-second countdown before the shutter fires. This is how you capture things that disappear when you click elsewhere: open dropdowns, hover tooltips, context menus and focus states.

The editor

Every capture lands in the editor as a background image with an annotation layer on top. Annotations stay live objects until you export — nothing is baked into the pixels while you work.

• Click an annotation with the Select tool to pick it.
• Drag it to move. Corner handles resize it. Arrow keys nudge by one pixel.
• Delete removes the selected annotation.
• Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y walk the full history — there is no undo limit.

The colour row sets the colour for the next thing you draw, and for whatever is currently selected. Stroke width has three steps: S, M and L.

Tool reference

About the blur tool

Blur is the one tool worth understanding properly. While you are editing, the blur is an object you can move or delete. On export, the pixels underneath are genuinely replaced — there is no original hiding underneath the exported PNG. Zoom into the file afterwards and you will see the data is gone, which is exactly what you want before posting a screenshot with an API key in it.

Exporting

The top-right of the editor has four actions:

• Download — pick PNG, JPG or WebP, and a size preset (Original, Full HD, HD, SD). A live estimate shows the resulting file size before you commit. Files are named captureflow-YYYY-MM-DD-HHmmss.png.
• Copy — puts a real image on the clipboard, ready to paste into Slack, Jira, Notion, Figma, Word or an email body.
• Print — opens the browser print dialog, scaled to the page.
• Upload & Get Link — uploads the capture and copies a short share link. Needs a free account.

PNG is the right default for screenshots of text and UI. Use JPG only when file size matters more than crispness — text edges soften noticeably.

CaptureFlow Studio: record a lesson

Studio records a whole lesson — your screen, your face and your drawings — into one video. It opens in its own tab. It needs a free account (Google sign-in), like all recording.

1. Click the CaptureFlow icon and open the Studio tab, then press Open Studio.
2. Under Capture source, choose Screen, Window, Tab or Camera (camera only, no screen).
3. Turn on Show my camera and pick a layout: Bubble, Side-by-side or Full frame. Drag the bubble on the preview to where you want it.
4. Check the microphone meter moves when you speak, and pick a quality (720p, 1080p or 4K).
5. Press Start Recording. Chrome asks what to share — pick it (tick share audio if you want the sound of a video you are showing). A 3-2-1 countdown follows.
6. A small floating controls window appears on top of everything: Pause, Stop, Next, Draw, Freeze, Board and Mic. It is never recorded.
7. Press Stop when you are done. Studio opens the Segments view.

Lessons are saved on your own computer as you go, and listed under Library. On the Free plan a lesson can be up to 30 minutes long and carries a small “Made with CaptureFlow” mark in the bottom-right corner; Studio stops the lesson by itself at 30 minutes and keeps everything recorded so far. Basic has no limit and no mark.

Drawing while you teach

• Draw (or Alt+Shift+D) lets you draw straight on the web page you are recording — Google Slides, a PDF in Chrome, any site. The first time, Chrome asks whether CaptureFlow may draw on websites; this is only used to put your ink on that page.
• Pick pens, colours and sizes in the floating controls: pen, highlighter, arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, text, laser pointer, spotlight and eraser. Undo with Ctrl+Z, clear with Delete, stop drawing with Esc.
• Freeze holds your screen still so you can draw on anything, including apps outside Chrome such as PowerPoint.
• Board switches to a blank whiteboard.

Only your ink is recorded. The tool buttons stay in the floating window, which is never part of the video.

Segments, retakes and export

• Press Next while recording to start a new segment. Each segment is a separate part of the lesson.
• Made a mistake? Discard & retake throws away only the current segment. Later, in Segments, you can retake any segment, drag segments into a new order, or delete one.
• To export, choose MP4 (plays everywhere, uploads to YouTube as-is) or WebM (faster), a resolution, and either Download the file or Get a shareable link.

My lesson has no sound

If the microphone meter in Studio does not move when you talk, Chrome is getting silence. Studio shows a warning after a few seconds of total silence. The usual cause is the microphone being muted in Windows, which Chrome cannot see:

1. Press your laptop’s microphone key (often F4 or F8, sometimes with Fn), or
2. Open Settings → System → Sound → Input, select your microphone and make sure it is not muted, then use Test your microphone.
3. On a Mac: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and allow Chrome.

The warning disappears as soon as Studio hears you.

Keyboard shortcuts

Remap any of the capture and Studio shortcuts (Studio also has unassigned ones for Freeze, Board, Next segment and Pause) at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. On macOS, Cmd replaces Ctrl.

Settings

Open the gear icon in the popup, or right-click the toolbar icon and choose Options.

Settings are stored with chrome.storage on your own machine and are never transmitted.

Plan limits

Taking screenshots, annotating them and downloading them is unlimited on every plan, forever, and needs no account. Limits apply only to uploading to the cloud, and they are counted per upload for the life of your account — deleting a capture removes its share link but does not give the upload back:

You can see how many uploads you have left any time in My captures. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I press the shortcut

Chrome leaves an extension shortcut unassigned when another extension already claimed those keys. Open chrome://extensions/shortcuts, find CaptureFlow, and set the three capture shortcuts by hand.

Capture fails on this page

Chrome blocks all extensions from reading certain pages: chrome:// internal pages, the Chrome Web Store, other extensions' pages, and the new-tab page. This is a browser restriction — no extension can capture them. Try the same capture on an ordinary website to confirm everything else works.

Full-page capture has repeated headers

A few sites re-show their sticky header on every scroll step in a way the detection misses. Workarounds: collapse the header first if the site allows it, or capture in two region shots. Send us the URL and it can usually be handled.

Full-page capture is missing content near the bottom

Lazy-loaded images sometimes need longer than the default pause. Scroll to the bottom of the page manually first so everything loads, scroll back to the top, then run the capture.

The image looks blurry or the wrong size

Check your export size preset — if it is set to HD or SD, the image is being downscaled on the way out. Set it to Original for a 1:1 capture.

Copy to clipboard does nothing

Clipboard writes require the editor tab to have focus. Click once anywhere in the editor, then press Copy. If you are on Linux, note that some clipboard managers drop image data when the source tab closes — paste before closing the tab.

Still stuck?

Email support@captureflow.pro with your browser, its version, and the page you were on. If the service worker logged an error, that helps too: go to chrome://extensions, find CaptureFlow, click service worker, and copy anything red from the console.