The Ultimate Guide to Automating Your Slide Capture with SlideSieve

Installation & Setup

Getting started with SlideSieve is incredibly straightforward. Once installed from the Chrome Web Store, we highly recommend pinning the extension to your Chrome toolbar. This ensures the extension icon is always visible when you start a new course video.

The Core Workflow

1. Navigate to any supported video platform (like DeepLearning.AI, Coursera, Udemy, or YouTube) and open a video lecture, but don't press play just yet!

2. Click the prominent Start Auto Capture button located on the SlideSieve floating toolbar directly under the video player. Now you can hit play, and the extension will capture every slide from the very beginning.

3. Start playing your video.

4. (Optional) Click the SlideSieve extension icon in your Chrome toolbar (or the Side Panel toggle on the floating toolbar) to open the side panel and watch your slides get captured in real-time.

That's it. The algorithm works silently in the background, extracting actual slide content while skipping the instructor's webcam.

Mastering the Interface

While the auto-capture is magical, SlideSieve provides a robust set of tools to manage your captured content perfectly.

Toolbar & Side Panel

SlideSieve's interface is split into two seamless components: a floating toolbar used for capturing slides in the course page, and a dedicated side panel that acts as your workspace to view, manage, and export those captured slides. Because it operates natively inside Chrome's Side Panel, it never blocks your video or clutters the webpage. You can easily show or hide the side panel at any time by clicking the toggle button on the floating toolbar or the extension icon.

Course & Lesson Organization

At the top of the SlideSieve panel, you'll notice the Course and Lesson dropdowns. The extension automatically extracts the course name and lesson title directly from the webpage URL. All your captured slides are organized neatly into these specific lesson buckets, ensuring your slides never get mixed up.

View Types

To review your captured slides effectively, SlideSieve offers 3 distinct viewing modes:

• Grid View: A compact overview of all slides in the lesson.
• List View: A larger, scrolling view to read text easily.
• Single Slide View: Focus entirely on one slide at a time to check details.

Power User Features

Manual Control & Shortcuts

Sometimes you want to capture a specific frame that the auto-detector might skip (like an interesting diagram drawn by the instructor).

• The Snap Button: Click the "Snap" button in the panel to instantly capture the current video frame.

• Keyboard Shortcuts: Use the default Ctrl + Shift + 9 shortcut to trigger a manual snap instantly! You can easily customize this mapping at any time by visiting chrome://extensions/shortcuts in your browser.

Slide Management

Not every captured slide makes the final cut.

• Selecting Slides: Use the select toggle to pick specific slides. Once selected, these slides can be exported on their own or batch removed to quickly clean up your workspace.
• Removing Slides: Simply hover over any slide thumbnail in the panel and click the "×" icon to instantly delete it from your local storage.

Export Options

Once your lesson is complete, it's time to export your slides.

• Export to PDF: Click the Export button to compile all (or selected) slides into a clean, multi-page document. SlideSieve perfectly preserves the original aspect ratio of every slide.
• Export as Images: Prefer raw image files? You can export the slides as a ZIP file of individual images.

Sync & Settings

At the bottom of the panel, you'll find additional controls:

• Auto-Scroll Sync: By default, the side panel will automatically scroll to the bottom whenever a new slide is captured. If you want to review older slides while the video is still playing, simply toggle the Sync button off to pause auto-scrolling. Click it again when you're ready to snap back to the latest capture!
• Settings: Access the settings gear to customize SlideSieve to your workflow. You can easily change your keyboard shortcuts, set the default floating toolbar position, switch between light and dark themes, and adjust advanced capture preferences.