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Screenshot Selection

Capture note content in Obsidian as a PNG. On desktop, selected rendered content is copied to the system clipboard. On mobile, selected text or the current markdown block is copied to the clipboard when possible, with a vault file fallback.

The image inherits your current Obsidian theme (fonts, colors, callouts, code highlighting), so the output looks the way the note looks on screen.

Features

• Works in Reading View and Live Preview
• Preserves your theme — dark / light, fonts, callouts, code highlighting
• Captures the full selection, even if it scrolls beyond the screen
• Desktop: copies straight to the system clipboard — no save dialog or file management
• Mobile: copies to the clipboard, or saves to Attachments/Screenshots/ if iOS blocks image writing; can also capture the current block without a precise touch selection
• Capture from the camera ribbon icon or the editor context menu
• Optional watermark — a corner label or a diagonal tiled overlay

Install

From the Community Plugins browser

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse
2. Search for "Screenshot Selection"
3. Install and enable

Manual install

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Drop them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/screenshot-selection/
3. Settings → Community plugins → reload and enable "Screenshot Selection"

Usage

Desktop

1. Open a note, switch to Reading View or Live Preview
2. Select the content you want to capture (drag-select with the mouse)
3. Open the command palette (Cmd-P / Ctrl-P) and run Capture selection to clipboard
4. Paste (Cmd-V / Ctrl-V) into any app that accepts images

Assign a hotkey via Settings → Hotkeys for one-keystroke capture.

Mobile

1. Open a note — Reading View gives the most faithful result
2. Select the text you want to capture (or, in the editor, place the cursor inside a block to capture the whole block)
3. Tap the camera ribbon action, use the editor menu item, or run Capture selection or block to file
4. If clipboard writing succeeds, paste the PNG into another app
5. If iOS rejects clipboard writing, the PNG is saved under Attachments/Screenshots/; when possible, an image embed is inserted below the captured block

Watermark (optional)

Off by default. To brand or protect your screenshots, enable a watermark in Settings → Screenshot Selection:

• Style — Corner label (a short line in the corner you choose) or Diagonal tiled (repeated text across the whole image)
• Text — any string, e.g. your handle
• Opacity — 0–1; a corner label looks good around 0.5, a tiled overlay around 0.1
• Font size, and color (leave blank to use the theme's muted text color)

The watermark is drawn onto the image at capture time, so it stays on the PNG you paste or save.

Known limits

• Desktop clipboard capture expects a rendered selection — switch to Live Preview or Reading View
• Mobile is most faithful in Reading View; Live Preview clones the editor DOM and may look different. If iOS can't rasterize the selection, the capture falls back to a plainer text render
• Mobile clipboard image write may still be rejected by iOS; the plugin falls back to saving a vault file
• Cross-origin embeds (iframes, external PDFs) are hidden in the captured image
• Very tall selections are rejected — split into smaller captures

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/HWY1dot0/obsidian-screenshot-selection
cd obsidian-screenshot-selection
npm install
OBSIDIAN_VAULT=~/path/to/your/vault npm run build

The build copies main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css to <OBSIDIAN_VAULT>/.obsidian/plugins/screenshot-selection/. Use npm run dev for watch mode.

Network usage

This plugin makes no network requests of its own. It uses the modern-screenshot library, which — when rendering a selection that contains externally-hosted images (e.g. <img src="https://...">) — may have your browser fetch those images so they can be embedded in the capture. No data is sent to any third-party server by the plugin.

More plugins by HWY1dot0

• Calendar Hub — one calendar that surfaces every note from a given day, in any folder.
• Copy for Email — copy notes as rich text that survives pasting into Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail.

If this plugin helps your workflow, you can buy me a coffee.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.