Captures

What is a capture?

A capture is a unit of stored knowledge in Gearbox Relay. Each capture contains:

• Original text — The exact text you copied or pasted
• Summary — A one-paragraph AI-generated description of the content
• Tags — AI-assigned topic labels that help organize and discover related captures
• Timestamps — When captured, when last modified
• Embedding vector — A 384-dimensional semantic representation for similarity search
• Source metadata — How it was captured (clipboard, extension, share, manual paste)

Capture sources

Desktop clipboard watcher

The clipboard watcher runs as a background process in the system tray. When you copy text from any application, Gearbox Relay captures it automatically.

What gets captured:

• Text copied from any application (browsers, documents, PDFs, messages)
• Plain text only — images and files are not captured by the clipboard watcher

What does not get captured:

• Sensitive data like passwords (the watcher respects some application-level signals)
• Text from apps that clear the clipboard immediately after copying
• Very large text selections (limited to ~100KB per capture)

Pausing the watcher: Right-click the system tray icon to pause or resume capture. When paused, copied text is not captured but clipboard monitoring continues in the background.

Browser extension

The Chrome extension provides two capture methods:

Right-click capture:

1. Select text in any webpage
2. Right-click and choose "Capture to Gearbox"
3. The capture is sent directly to your local Gearbox Relay via http://127.0.0.1:3000

Keyboard shortcut:

• Alt+Shift+R captures the currently selected text
• Works on any page without right-clicking

Permissions used:

• contextMenus — Right-click menu
• activeTab — Access selected text on current tab
• scripting — Execute the capture script
• clipboardRead — Fallback clipboard access

Mobile share

On iOS and Android, capture text from any app that supports the system share menu:

1. Select text in any app
2. Tap the share button
3. Choose "Gearbox Relay"
4. The capture is enriched on-device and added to your library

This is the primary capture method on mobile since there is no clipboard watcher equivalent.

Manual paste

You can paste text directly into the Gearbox Relay window:

1. Click the paste area or press Ctrl/Cmd+V
2. Preview the text before saving
3. Optionally add notes or manually assign tags
4. Click Save to add to your library

Manual paste is useful when:

• The source app clears the clipboard immediately
• You want to preview or edit before capturing
• Capturing from an app where copying is disabled

Managing captures

Viewing your captures

The capture library shows all your captures in reverse chronological order. Use the search bar to find specific captures by keyword or meaning.

Editing a capture

1. Click on any capture to open its detail view
2. Edit the original text, summary, or tags
3. Changes are saved automatically
4. Edited captures are re-synced to other devices

Deleting a capture

1. Open the capture detail view
2. Click the delete button (trash icon)
3. Confirm deletion

Deleted captures are permanently removed from your local database and from sync. This cannot be undone.

Tag management

Tags are auto-generated by AI but you can also:

Add manual tags:

1. Open capture detail view
2. Click "Add tag"
3. Type a tag name and press Enter

Remove tags:

1. Open capture detail view
2. Click the × on any tag

Bulk tag operations:

• Filter by tag to see all captures with that tag
• Multi-select captures and add/remove tags in bulk

Capture limits

There is no hard limit on captures in the Free tier. The practical limit is your device's storage capacity.

Sync storage limits apply:

• Free: 50 MB encrypted sync storage
• Pro: 5 GB encrypted sync storage

Text captures are typically 100 bytes to 10 KB each. You can store hundreds of thousands of captures before hitting storage limits.

Search within captures

Your captures are fully searchable. See Search for detailed documentation on finding captures by keyword, meaning, or filters.