I built a screenshot manager because my desktop was becoming a black hole

I take a lot of screenshots. Tutorials I'm halfway through. UI patterns I want to steal. Research I tell myself I'll come back to. For years my system was: dump everything on the desktop, maybe sort it into a folder later, never look at it again.

The folder would fill up. I'd make a new folder. Then a folder inside that folder. Then a folder called "misc" that had 200 files in it and no clear reason to exist. I'd search my own desktop and find three screenshots of the same thing taken on different days because I couldn't find the first one.

So I built Captop.

The core idea is simple: Ctrl+V to paste any screenshot directly into a workbook. Add a note while it's fresh in your head. Tag it. Move on. It's all stored locally (IndexedDB, no cloud) so there's no account friction and nothing leaves your machine.

It's a Chrome extension + web workspace combo. The extension handles capture — you select an area on any page and it auto-saves to whichever folder you've got open. The workspace is where you browse, search, and export to PDF. Keyboard-first, fullscreen viewing, batch operations — I built it the way I actually wanted to use it.

The use case I didn't expect to resonate: people using it for studying. Paste screenshots from online courses, add notes about what confused you, export the whole thing as a PDF study guide. A few early users told me this was the main thing they used it for, which wasn't my original vision but makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

It's free to try. I'm still figuring out the business side — right now I'm focused on making the core experience really good and getting feedback from people who actually use it.

Would love to hear how other people here handle visual information overload. And if screenshot management is a problem you've felt, I'd be happy for you to try it and tell me what's broken.

https://captop.in/