SideNote ProSend a screenshot to AI without leaving Windows
Some questions are far easier to show than to describe. SideNote Pro has native screen capture built in, so an error dialog, a chart or a broken layout can go straight into a conversation without a round trip through a separate screenshot tool.
Four capture modes
| Mode | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Region | A rectangle you drag over any part of the desktop |
| Active window | The window that was in front before you summoned SideNote Pro |
| Current screen | The full pixel bounds of one monitor, not just its work area |
| Entire desktop | The whole Windows virtual desktop across every display |
Region capture temporarily hides SideNote Pro, captures the virtual desktop as a visible backdrop, and shows a translucent selection overlay. You drag out the area you want and see a blue selection rectangle; Esc or a right-click cancels. The selected region is attached to your pending request as a PNG.
Active-window capture remembers the foreground window from the summon or capture flow, so it captures what you were looking at rather than the assistant itself, and uses DWM visible-frame bounds where available. Capture works in physical coordinates throughout, so multiple displays and negative virtual-desktop positions behave correctly.
Other ways to attach an image
- The image picker. PNG, JPEG or JPG, and WebP.
- Drag and drop onto the assistant window.
- Clipboard paste with
Ctrl+Vwhen the clipboard holds a bitmap. Useful with the Windows snipping tools you already use. - The built-in screenshot tool, described above.
Up to five images can be pending per request. They are previewed locally before sending, can be removed from the composer individually, and are kept in deterministic order so *the first image* means what you expect. They travel to your provider as base64 data URLs in the OpenAI-compatible multimodal message shape.
Your model needs image support
Multimodal input is a model capability, not an application one. SideNote Pro can format and send the image correctly to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, but a text-only model will refuse it or ignore it. If images seem to be dropped, check the model rather than the app. This applies to local providers too: many small local models are text-only.
SideNote Pro does not perform OCR of its own. Whatever text a model can read out of your screenshot, it reads with its own vision capability.
Nothing is watching your screen
This deserves to be stated flatly, because *screen awareness* has become a common feature in this category and it is not what SideNote Pro does. There is no background capture, no periodic screenshotting, no ambient screen understanding and no monitoring service.
A screenshot exists because you started one. A clipboard image is read because you pressed Ctrl+V. And an attached image is transmitted only when you send the message it is attached to. Protected or DRM-restricted surfaces may still come out blank, because Windows blocks their capture regardless of who is asking.