Where your screenshots actually go when SnipAlt describes them

When you press Ctrl+Shift+A (⌘⇧A on a Mac) and drag a box around an image, the picture leaves your screen for a moment. It travels over an encrypted connection to SnipAlt’s server, which passes it to an AI model at Anthropic to write the description, and the text comes back to you. That’s the whole trip.

The part people ask about is what happens to the image afterward. SnipAlt doesn’t keep it. There is no library of your screenshots on our servers. Your snip history — thumbnails paired with their alt text — lives inside the app, on your own computer.

Why the description happens on a server

Writing a good image description takes a large vision model, and models like that typically run on servers rather than on an ordinary laptop. So the desktop app sends the snip to SnipAlt Cloud, which makes the request with SnipAlt’s own credentials. You never handle an API key, and nothing is sent until you make a snip.

That design means there are three parties in the path: SnipAlt, Anthropic (the AI provider), and the hosting company that runs our server. Our privacy policy lists all three and says we don’t sell personal information.

What SnipAlt keeps, and what it doesn’t

On our side, we store account basics: your email address, a hashed version of your password, and your subscription status. We don’t store the image you snipped, and we don’t log what was in it next to your usage counts.

Anthropic is a separate company with its own terms, and it’s fair to read them rather than take our word for it. Its documentation says that retained API data is never used for model training without express permission, and its data retention page sets out how long inputs and outputs are held, including exceptions for legal requirements and content flagged for policy violations. Those retention rules are Anthropic’s to set, not ours, so we won’t summarize them into something tidier than they are.

Habits that keep sensitive screens out of it

The easiest privacy control is the snip itself. Draw the box around only the image you need described, not the whole window. A chart doesn’t need the browser tabs and inbox notifications around it, and a product photo doesn’t need your desktop.

Some images carry more than pixels: an unreleased product, a student record on a dashboard, a screenshot with names on it. For those, check your organization’s own rules before you snip, since we’re not a substitute for your privacy or legal team. Alt text for screenshots covers how to describe interface images without repeating every visible word, and describing photos of people covers what belongs in a description when a face or a name is involved.

If you want the workflow behind all this, one hotkey, no upload step shows what writing alt text inside your actual workflow looks like. And if you’re deciding whether this effort is worth it at all, why alt text matters is the place to start.