Help & Documentation

Account, trial & plans

Sign in once, and your library follows you everywhere you use SyncMyCopy.

SyncMyCopy signs you in with Google so it can sync through your own Google Drive. There's no separate account to create, no password to remember.

First install shows a short welcome tour automatically, walking through the basics. It only runs once, an update to an existing install doesn't repeat it, check the Changelog for what's new instead.

1. Click the SyncMyCopy icon in your toolbar, then Sign in with Google.
2. Allow Drive access when Google asks (a private, app-only folder, SyncMyCopy can't see any of your other Drive files).
3. Your 14-day free trial starts automatically, every premium feature is unlocked for two weeks, no card required.
4. To keep premium features after the trial, click Go Premium in the popup and choose monthly ($3.14) or annual ($31.40, two months free), paid via PayPal.
5. Cancel any time from PayPal, or email support, your data stays in your Drive either way.

Free, forever: highlighting, on-page annotations, notes, tags, reader mode, clean links, PDF/JSON export, importing, starring/archiving, filtering, deep (full-text) keyword search, the Stats dashboard, scratchpad, and bookmarks, all synced automatically to your own Drive and across every browser you sign into.

Premium (after trial): creating new Snapshots, Clips, Documents and Projects, and AI features, need an active premium or trial plan, synced across your browsers the same way. If your plan lapses, you keep reading, searching and managing everything you already saved, forever, only saving new ones pauses.

The popup, at a glance

Click the toolbar icon for quick actions on whatever page you're on.

• Top nav: Snapshot, Read mode, Library, Settings, About, one click each.
• Account row: your email, last sync time, and plan badge (Free / Trial / Premium).
• Sync Now and Restore Previous Bookmarks, manual controls if you don't want to wait for automatic sync.
• This page: star or archive the current page, pick a highlight colour, add a page note or tag, file the page into a project (with autocomplete suggesting tags you've already used elsewhere), and see every highlight you've made here, click one to jump straight to it on the page.
• Recent bookmarks and Recent highlights: collapsible lists with a link into the full Library.

Highlighting the web Free

Mark anything, in six colours you define, and it's there next time you visit.

1. Select any text on a page.
2. A small colour menu appears (by default, the instant you select, configurable to only appear on right-click in Settings), pick a colour.
3. The text is highlighted in place, and saved to your Library automatically.
4. Come back later, on any browser you're signed into, and your highlights are exactly where you left them.

Each of the six colours can carry your own label (Important, Quote, Idea, Objection, whatever you want), set them in Settings → Color labels. The label shows in the menu so you never map a thought to the wrong colour.

Click an existing highlight on the page to open its menu: change colour, add or edit notes and tags, or delete it. Deleting asks you to confirm first.

Annotations (on-page notes) Free

A short note that shows up right on the page, not hidden behind a click.

Deliberately separate from a highlight's private notes: an annotation is meant to be seen, on the page itself, as a small coloured badge sitting right after the highlight.

1. Click an existing highlight to open its menu, and find the Annotation field near the top.
2. Type a short line and press Enter (or click away), a coloured badge appears on the page right after the highlight.
3. Pick a style for it: Pill, Box, Outlined, or Mono. Your choice becomes the default for the next annotation you add.
4. Click the badge on the page any time to reopen the menu and edit or clear it.

One annotation per highlight, no character limit (long ones just truncate visually on the page, the full text is still there when you click in).

Notes & tags Free

Write down why a highlight mattered, while it's still fresh.

1. Open a highlight's menu (click it on the page, or find it in the Library) and add a note.
2. Add a second note later, either it appends to the first, or becomes its own timestamped entry, controlled by Settings → Add new notes as separate entries.
3. Add one or more tags directly to that specific highlight (separate from the page-level tags you can set in the popup's "This page" panel). Typing a tag suggests ones you've already used elsewhere in your library.

Both page-level and per-highlight tags are usable in the Library's colour/tag filters and in PDF export grouping.

Reader mode Free

Strip the clutter, keep the words, and your highlights come with you.

1. Click Read mode in the popup on an article page.
2. Use the A+ / A- controls to adjust text size.
3. Your highlights for that page appear inline, in colour, with a toggle to hide them if you'd rather read clean.
4. Navigate to Library, Snapshots or Settings directly from the reader's own nav links.

Clean links (tracking-parameter cleanup) Free

Strip tracking junk from the links you bookmark, automatically or with a quick undo.

Highlights and snapshots always store a cleaned URL behind the scenes (so tracking codes never split one article into duplicates). This setting is specifically about what happens to the URLs you bookmark.

1. Open Settings → Tracking parameters.
2. Choose a mode: Remove them, but let me undo (default), Remove automatically (no prompt), or Leave links unchanged.
3. In undo mode, set how long the on-page Undo toast stays up (10s to 5min) so you have time to decide before it disappears.

Removed: known tracking/campaign codes that don't change where the link goes, utm_*, HubSpot's hubs_*/hsa_*, Matomo/Piwik, Vero, Branch, Google Analytics share links, and dozens of click IDs like fbclid, gclid, msclkid, mc_eid, mkt_tok.

Kept: parameters the page actually needs, search queries, page numbers, item/video IDs, anything that would break the link if stripped.

The Library

Every highlight, bookmark, snapshot, clip, project and scratch note, in one dashboard.

1. Click Library in the popup, or open it directly at library.html.
2. Switch between seven tabs: Highlights, Bookmarks, Snapshots, Swipe file, Projects, Scratchpad, Stats.
3. In Highlights, toggle Card or List view (your choice is remembered), and filter by All / Starred / Archived.
4. Click any page's title to open its full detail view, every highlight and note on that page, in order.
5. In the Bookmarks tab: favicons, folder counts, and rename/delete/open right from the row.
6. Click the 🌙 icon in the header any time to toggle dark mode.

Search (keyword & AI) Keyword: free AI: premium

Find the line you saved, even if you don't remember the exact words.

1. Type into the Library's search box, results narrow instantly with matched terms highlighted.
2. With an AI key set and an active premium/trial plan, switch to AI search to find highlights by meaning, not just exact words (e.g. "that line about urgency" finds it even if it never says "urgency").
3. AI search is the default mode automatically once you have a working key, it falls back to keyword search on a free or no-key account.

Tick Deep search next to the search box to also match inside the full text of your saved snapshots, not just their titles. It works in both Keyword and AI mode, and Keyword + Deep search needs no AI key or premium plan at all, it's plain local text matching. Matches are read from what's already cached on this device; an uncached snapshot triggers a one-time Drive fetch, which then stays cached for next time.

Full-page snapshots pinned for offline reading are skipped by default, their saved copy is the raw whole-page text (menus, buttons, footers included), not clean article text, so matching against it tends to surface noisy, irrelevant hits. See Snapshots → Make this snapshot searchable to opt a specific one in.

Filtering by colour & tag Free

Narrow the Library, or any single project, to exactly the highlights you need.

1. Open the filter control in the Library (or inside a project).
2. Select one or more colours and/or tags, filters combine (AND), so picking a colour and a tag shows only highlights matching both.
3. Clear the filter to go back to everything.

Star & archive Free

A lightweight bookmark for a page you haven't highlighted yet, and a way to file it away without deleting it.

1. In the popup's "This page" panel (or from a Library card), click the star (☆) to save the page as a quick bookmark, no highlight required.
2. Click archive (📥) once you're done with a page, it moves out of the default Library view but isn't deleted.
3. Use the Starred / Archived filters in the Library to see just those.

Projects Premium

Group highlights, snapshots and clips into a workspace per client, campaign or piece.

1. Create a project from the Library's Projects tab, or on the fly with "+ New project…" right inside the highlight menu's, the popup's, or the clip panel's Add-to-project picker.
2. Add pages, individual highlights, snapshots and clips to it from wherever you're saving them.
3. Open a project to see its Highlights, Snapshots and Swipe file as their own sections, rendered the same way their own Library tab looks, not a flat link list.
4. Filter within a project by colour/tag, same as the main Library.
5. Remove an item from a project without deleting it from your Library (removing ≠ deleting).
6. Rename or delete a project any time, deleting asks whether to also delete its items from your Library, or just remove the project and keep them.

Stats dashboard Free

One number for everything you've saved, plus a trend chart and a breakdown by type.

1. Open the Library's Stats tab.
2. The hero number is everything you've saved across your whole Library, computed entirely on this device from what's already loaded, nothing is sent anywhere to build it.
3. Below it, a live Google Drive storage figure, this one genuinely asks Drive for a current number each time you open the tab, it's the one stat here that isn't computed locally.
4. A trend chart and a per-type breakdown (highlights, bookmarks, snapshots, clips, projects, scratchpad notes) follow, each with its own detail card.

Snapshots Premium

A clean, permanent copy of an article, so it survives a rewrite, a paywall, or the page disappearing entirely.

1. Click the 📸 Snapshot button in the popup on any article, it saves the article's text and headings (ads, menus and sidebars stripped) to your Drive.
2. Or turn on Settings → Auto-snapshot pages you highlight, so the first highlight on a page also snapshots it, with no extra click.
3. Read any saved snapshot from the Library's Snapshots tab (📖 to open), your highlights for that page show inline, in colour.
4. Pin a snapshot for offline reading, its images are embedded, not remote links, so it's genuinely readable with no internet.

A full-page snapshot you've pinned for offline reading is excluded from Deep search by default, its saved copy is the raw whole-page text, not clean article text. Open its menu and choose Make this snapshot searchable to extract a clean, searchable text copy from what's already saved, nothing is re-fetched from the live page, and the original pinned copy is never changed. Look for the 🔍 Searchable badge once it's done. If the page isn't shaped like an article (a dashboard, a pricing page), you'll be told plainly rather than getting a poor-quality result.

Clips (swipe file) Premium

Drag the exact CTA, hero or pricing table out of a page, it lands tagged and linked back to its source.

1. Right-click any page and choose "Start clipping (visible area)", or use a keyboard shortcut you've assigned (see below).
2. The page dims, drag a box around what you want to capture.
3. A tag panel opens with the cropped image: add tags, pick a project, add a note, then Save to swipe file.
4. Find every clip in the Library's Swipe file tab, filter by tag, edit tags after the fact, or delete one.

Right-click any image on a page and choose "Save image as Clip", it captures exactly that image (no drag-select needed) and opens the same tag panel to file it. Only offered on actual <img> elements, not CSS background images.

No shortcut is set by default. Go to Settings → Clips → Set keyboard shortcut… (opens Chrome's own shortcuts page) and assign one to "Clip a region of this page".

Tick "Keep using these for my next clips" when saving, and the same tag/project carry over automatically to your next clips (shown as a removable chip in the clip toolbar so it's never a silent surprise). Clear it with the ✕, or it resets when you close your browser.

Documents Premium

Store the file, not just a link to it.

1. Open the Library's Documents tab.
2. Drag a PDF or image in, or paste one, it uploads straight to your own Google Drive.
3. Click a document to view it, images open in a viewer, PDFs open in your browser's own PDF viewer.
4. Turn an uploaded image into a Clip in one click, no need to re-save it separately.
5. Delete a document to remove it from your Drive too, not just from the Library view.

Unlike Snapshots and Clips, a document isn't wrapped or re-processed, it's the real file, uploaded as-is via Drive's resumable upload (so a large PDF survives a dropped connection and picks up where it left off).

Scratchpad Free

A sticky-note space for the hook or line that hits before you've even opened a page to highlight, synced across every browser you sign into.

1. Open the Library's Scratchpad tab and click "+ New note".
2. Just start typing, it autosaves automatically after about a second, there's nothing to click to save.
3. Give it a colour, the same six colours as your highlights, so a colour means the same thing everywhere in your library.
4. Type 1. , * or - at the start of a line to turn it into a real list, same shortcut as Google Docs. Add a link and it shows as a small chip, click it for a preview of the URL (and a way to remove it) rather than jumping straight to a new tab.
5. Delete a note when you're done with it (asks to confirm if it has text).

Export to PDF Free

Two different ways to turn your highlights into something you can actually hand someone.

Turns a page's, a project's, or your whole Library's highlights into a clean PDF, grouped by colour, tag, or page, with your notes and tags included, each highlight shown in its own colour.

1. Click Export PDF from a page's menu, from within a project, or from the Library toolbar.
2. Choose grouping and which colours/tags to include (or skip this dialog every time, set a default grouping in Settings → Export (PDF)).
3. Your browser's own "Save as PDF" print dialog opens, nothing leaves your device.

Right-click any page and choose "Save this page as PDF (with highlights)", this uses your browser's native print/Save-as-PDF on the actual page, with your highlights already painted into it, exactly as you see them.

Export library (JSON) Free

A portable backup of everything, not for reading, for keeping or scripting.

Different from PDF export above: this downloads one JSON file (a plain-text, machine-readable format) with every highlight, note, tag, project and Scratchpad note, read straight from this device, nothing is uploaded to build it.

1. Open Settings → Export library (JSON) and click Export as JSON.
2. A file named syncmycopy-library-<date>.json downloads immediately.

Import from other tools Free

Switching from another app? Bring your saves with you, nothing gets duplicated.

1. Open Settings → Import bookmarks & highlights.
2. Bookmarks (HTML): export from Pocket (getpocket.com/export) or any browser's bookmark manager, imported links land in a folder called "Imported from Pocket" and sync like the rest of your bookmarks.
3. Highlights (CSV): Readwise, Raindrop or Instapaper's export.
4. Highlights (Markdown): Glasp or Matter's export.
5. Choose the file and click Import, it's read entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Bookmark sync Free, forever

Free on every plan, no card, no time limit, same as the rest of your library.

1. Sign in with the same Google account on every browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge, any other Chromium browser).
2. Add, rename, move or delete a bookmark anywhere, it appears everywhere else within a few seconds (real-time), or within about a minute at the outside (automatic fallback if the real-time signal is ever missed).
3. Only what actually changed gets touched, not a full rebuild, so it's safe on large collections and never flickers your whole tree.
4. Made a mistake? Restore Previous Bookmarks in the popup rolls back to the last backed-up copy.

Almost anything you can bookmark in a browser syncs: chrome:// pages, ftp:// links, file: paths, and bookmarks to a bare IP address or local hostname (a router's admin page, say) all carry over to your other browsers like any other bookmark.

AI features (bring your own key) Premium

Summarize, ask questions, and search by meaning, using your own API key, your own bill.

1. Open Settings → AI (Bring Your Own Key).
2. Pick a provider: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, or Perplexity.
3. Paste your API key (get one from the provider's own site, linked right there), and optionally pick a specific model from the dropdown, or choose "Custom model…" to pin an exact ID not listed yet.
4. Click Test connection to confirm it works before relying on it.
5. Your key is saved in your own Google Drive, so it's available across every browser you sign into, and every AI call goes directly from your browser to your provider, never through SyncMyCopy's servers.

• Summarize a page of highlights into a digest.
• Ask a question against your own highlights.
• AI semantic search, find a highlight by meaning, not exact words.

Settings, at a glance

Every preference lives in one place, and syncs across your browsers.

Open Settings from the popup. It's organised into cards: Highlighting (default colour, menu trigger, note behaviour, auto-snapshot), Color labels, Tracking parameters, Undo for deletes, Clips (image format, keyboard shortcut), Import, Export (PDF), Export library (JSON), and AI. Each card has its own inline explainer if you need more detail than fits here, click Save settings at the bottom when you're done.

Changes sync to your other signed-in browsers automatically, same as everything else.

After an update: reloading a page

Why a tab sometimes stops responding right after SyncMyCopy updates, and the two ways it tells you.

When the extension updates (a new version installs, or you reload it from chrome://extensions during development), Chrome disconnects every already-open tab from the new version. The tab's page keeps working, but SyncMyCopy's code on it can no longer save anything until that specific tab is reloaded. This is a Chrome platform behaviour, not something any extension can fully work around.

• Trying to highlight, edit, clip, snapshot or add to a project on a stale tab shows an on-page message telling you to reload.
• Right-clicking such a tab shows a dedicated "SyncMyCopy was updated. Reload this page too." item directly in the main menu, click it, and everything works normally again.

Where your data lives

The short version: your content is yours, and it stays yours.

Every highlight, note, snapshot, clip, project and scratch note is stored in your own Google Drive (a private, app-only folder) and on your own device, never on SyncMyCopy's servers. The only thing on the backend is a small record for sign-in and your plan status, your email and whether a trial/subscription is active, nothing else.

AI calls go straight from your browser to your chosen provider, using your own key. Payments are handled entirely by PayPal, SyncMyCopy never sees your card details.

Read the full Privacy Policy for the complete picture.

General troubleshooting & FAQ

Contact support

SyncMyCopy is built and run by one person. Email support@syncmycopy.com for anything, a bug, a billing question, a feature idea, or just to say the swipe file finally worked for once.