Screenshots — keep the frame
Part of your notes: grab whatever is on screen, with the moment burnt into the picture, and it comes out in your PDF and DOC exports.
Keep the frame you are looking at — a slide, a diagram, a line of code — with the moment burnt into the picture. It goes on a note, it turns up in your PDF and DOC exports, and it needs no key, no account and no extra permission.
Grabbing one
Open the Study chip on the video you’re watching — the camera sits in your notes, beside the note and scissors buttons. A screenshot
is
a note with a picture on it, so there is nothing to switch on and no separate gallery to visit.
Press Grab frame. The video is not paused and not moved — whatever is on screen is what you get, at the exact second you pressed.
Keep grabbing. With the composer open the button reads Add frame, and every press adds another picture to the note you are writing — the slide, the next slide, the diagram three minutes later. They stay in the order you took them, and each thumbnail has a small × if you caught the wrong moment. It works the other way round too: a note you started with Note, or a passage you marked with the scissors, can carry pictures as well.
Add a caption if you want one, and save. A caption is optional here, unlike a clip: the picture is the content. However many frames you added, it is
one
note.
Where they show up
In your notes, under the caption, alongside everything else you kept on that video. Click the timestamp to jump the video back to that moment, or use the save button on the row to keep the picture as a file.
In your PDF and DOC exports, embedded under the note they belong to.
In Markdown and JSON the note is there with its caption and timestamp, but the picture is not — a text file with megabytes of encoded image in it is not a text file. Use the save button for the file itself.
Room, and what gets cleared
Pictures are the one thing in the study tools that is eventually deleted to make room: the oldest go once they are a few months old, or once the store gets large. Your notes and their timestamps are never touched, so a cleared screenshot leaves the note that described it and the exact second it came from — the panel offers to take you back there, and grabbing it again costs nothing. Settings → Data shows how much room they are using.
Questions
Can I take one from the extension popup?
No — grabbing reads the video that is playing, so it happens on the YouTube page. The popup lists what you kept, in with your notes, opens each at its moment and saves them to disk.
Is there a limit on how many pictures one note can hold?
No fixed number. They share the same room every screenshot shares (see above), so a note with eight frames simply uses eight frames’ worth of it — and the clear-out, when it comes, works picture by picture: a note can lose one frame and keep the rest, each with the moment it came from so you can grab it again.
How do I delete just the picture and keep what I wrote?
You cannot, deliberately. Delete removes the note and every picture on it, because one list holding notes, clips and screenshots with two delete buttons meaning different things is how people lose something they meant to keep. If you want the words without the picture, copy them into a new note first — and remember that clearing a screenshot’s caption does not delete it: the picture keeps the note alive.
It says the video is copy-protected.
Some videos (rentals, and a few music videos) are played through protected decoding, which browsers deliberately do not let a page read back. We detect that and save nothing, rather than quietly storing a black rectangle you would find later.
Does this need a new permission?
No. It draws the page’s own video into a canvas from the extension’s own code, so there is no screen capture, no downloads permission and nothing new on the permissions list.
What if an ad is playing?
It refuses. YouTube plays ads through the same player, so a frame grabbed mid-ad would be a picture of a commercial confidently stamped with a moment of your lecture.