OpenScreenShot

Screenshots and tab recording for Chrome. Everything stays on your device.

➜ Add to Chrome  ·  Website  ·  Docs  ·  Roadmap

Most screenshot extensions want an account, a watermark, or your browsing history. This one runs on your machine and wants nothing: no server, no telemetry, works offline.

Capture a full page, the visible area, or a region, then annotate and export. Record the current tab when a still image is not enough.

Features

• Capture whole pages, even behind sticky headers and inside nested scrollers
• Annotate with arrows, text, numbered steps, spotlight, and crop, with full undo
• Blur or redact secrets before you share
• Record the tab with auto-zoom at your clicks, mic and webcam, and trim
• Export as PNG, JPEG, WebP, or multi-page PDF, or copy straight to the clipboard

The full tour, every shortcut, and the settings reference live in the docs.

Install

Add to Chrome — works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and other Chromium browsers. To build from source, see Development.

Permissions & privacy

host_permissions is empty: activeTab grants access on your click, and the extension cannot read any site in the background. Captures, recordings, and edits stay in local browser storage until you export or delete them. Full policy: PRIVACY.md.

Every permission, line by line

Permission	Why
activeTab	Access the current tab — only when you click the extension, use a shortcut, or pick a capture from the right-click menu
scripting	Inject on-demand page functions for scroll-and-stitch, region selection, the quick-mode clipboard write, and the in-page recording control bar
storage (+ unlimitedStorage)	Settings, onboarding state, the last region rect, editing drafts, and stashing large full-page PNGs and recording chunks for the editor
downloads	Save exports, quick-mode captures, and recording exports to your Downloads folder
contextMenus	Add one capture submenu to the page right-click menu
clipboardWrite	Copy a screenshot from the editor or from quick mode; it never reads the clipboard
offscreen	Run the recording engine in a hidden document — MediaRecorder and the IndexedDB writes need a page context a service worker doesn't have
tabCapture (optional)	Requested once, at your first recording; every recording after that starts in one click
<all_urls> (optional host)	Only if you turn on "Record across sites" — keeps the cursor overlay alive when a recording navigates to a new origin

Development

TypeScript (strict) + Preact, bundled by Vite + @crxjs/vite-plugin. One runtime dependency (Preact); unit tests with Vitest. Node.js 22+ and npm 10+.

npm install
npm run icons      # generate the extension icons into public/icons
npm run dev        # Vite + crxjs with HMR (writes to dist/)

Load dist/ via chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked.

npm run build type-checks and bundles; npm run package produces the store zip. Other scripts: typecheck, lint, test, format, shots (marketing screenshots), site:dev / site:deploy (openscreenshot.app).

Project structure

openscreenshot/
├── manifest.json            # MV3 manifest (crxjs entry)
├── public/                  # icons + i18n messages
├── src/
│   ├── background/          # service worker (capture + recording coordinator)
│   ├── content/             # on-demand capture funcs (scroll, region, recording overlay)
│   ├── editor/              # annotation editor + export (Preact, own tab)
│   ├── offscreen/           # recording engine: MediaRecorder + IndexedDB chunks
│   ├── popup/               # popup UI (Preact)
│   ├── recorder/            # recording editor: timeline, zoom, trim, export (Preact, own tab)
│   └── shared/              # design tokens, messaging, storage, types, utils
├── mcp/                     # optional local CLI + MCP server
├── docs/                    # openscreenshot.app, served by site-worker.js
├── tests/unit/              # unit tests (Vitest)
└── scripts/                 # icon + screenshot pipelines

Screenshots from the CLI or an agent

openscreenshot (npm) is a separate, optional tool that drives the Chrome already on your machine — also fully local:

npx openscreenshot shot https://example.com --out shot.png --full

As an MCP server, add { "command": "npx", "args": ["openscreenshot", "serve"] } to your client config and call the capture_screenshot tool.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md and the roadmap. If OpenScreenShot is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee.

License

MIT © OpenScreenShot @PGHQdev