---
title: Whole-Conversation Capture
---

# Whole-Conversation Capture

> **Desktop app only.** The capture renders the live chat, so it needs the app's own window. The
> command is not shown in the phone app.

## What it is

A screenshot of a session's **entire conversation** — every message, drawn the way the chat draws
them. The ordinary screenshot only ever shows **one screenful**; a conversation of any length is
thousands of pixels taller than that, so "what does this whole chat look like" had no answer.

## Where to find it

Whole-Conversation Capture is a menu command rather than a panel of its own — there is no sidebar
row and no settings page for it. You run it from inside the session whose conversation you want a
picture of.

**Where to find it:** the session's **⋯ menu → Exports → Screenshot whole conversation**.

## How it behaves

### While it runs

- **A progress notification appears the moment you click** — *Taking a screenshot of this
  conversation…* — and updates in place as it goes: *Loading the full conversation…* (only when
  older messages still need loading), *Laying out messages — 40 of 163…*, *Taking the screenshot
  — 60%…*, then *Saving the screenshot…*.
- **Cancel** stops it at once, and is there until the last image starts saving — a save already
  under way finishes, and nothing after it starts. Anything already saved stays saved, and the
  notice tells you how many images that was.
- **Only one runs at a time.** Clicking again while one is running tells you one is already being
  taken.

### What you get

- **A normal screenshot.** It goes through the app's own screenshot system, exactly like a snip:
  - it is **copied to your clipboard**, ready to paste;
  - it is saved to the **Screenshots library**;
  - the usual **"Screenshot saved and copied to clipboard"** notice appears, with **Annotate** and
    **Share** — or, if you have switched to another app, the same notice floats over it.
  - Your snip settings apply: copy-only, the notification level and the capture sound. With
    copy-only on, the first image goes to your clipboard only; the rest of a long conversation
    still go to Screenshots, so nothing is lost.
- **One image** when the conversation fits — the common case. It is drawn at normal size or
  sharper (up to twice, on a high-resolution screen), up to 32,767 pixels tall.
- **Several images, in order,** when the conversation is too long for one readable picture. The
  first is on your clipboard and all of them are in the Screenshots library; a notice says how
  many there are, with a button that opens Screenshots (or that switches the Screenshots area on,
  if you have it turned off).
- **Never silently shrunk.** The only exception is a single message taller than a whole image:
  that one message is drawn a little softer so it fits, rather than being cut.
- If the conversation was longer than a capture can hold, a warning says how many messages were
  left out.

### What it is NOT

- **Not part of the chat.** It is a picture; it does not appear as a message, and nothing is sent
  anywhere.
- **Not a different rendering.** The image is produced from the app's own message components, so
  it matches what you see. It is not a Markdown re-render.
- **Not the same as Export → PDF / Markdown.** Those give you the conversation's *text* in a
  document. This gives you the conversation's *appearance* as a picture.

### Limits worth knowing

- **It captures the session you started it from.** Switching to another conversation, or to
  another program, normally does not stop it — it finishes in the background. If the conversation
  is **closed** (or the app unloads it), the screenshot stops and the notice says so.
- **It is a still frame.** If the session is actively generating, the image is a snapshot of that
  moment.
- **A very long conversation is capped** at 2,000 messages, and the cap is always reported — a
  capture never comes back quietly short.
- **It contains the conversation's text.** It is saved where your other screenshots are, so treat
  it like one before you share it.

## For agents

An agent can ask for a capture over the local control server too:

```
GET /session/:id/screenshot
```

An agent's capture is **private to the agent**: it is written to the app's own data folder and
never touches your clipboard, your Screenshots library or your screen. It only works for the
session the app is showing, and refuses a different one with a message rather than capturing the
wrong thing.

The image is useful only to a model that can **see images**. Text-only engines (for example the
DeepSeek models other than the vision variant) cannot read it — for those, use
`GET /session/:id/markdown`, which returns the transcript as text.

## Related

The ordinary, one-screenful screenshot is a separate command in the same **Exports** submenu, and
the other entries there — PDF and Markdown — give you the conversation's text rather than its
picture. If what you actually want is to hand someone a stable pointer to one conversation rather
than an image of it, that is on the [Deep Links](deep-links.md) page. Where captured files land on
disk, and how to look at them afterwards, belongs with the rest of the app's local storage notes on
the [logs and debugging](logs-and-debugging.md) page.