What Relic captures | Relic Help

The three kinds

On a computer Relic watches the clipboard and keeps a copy of everything you copy. You do not press anything. Copy a line of text, take a screenshot, copy a file in Explorer or Finder, and a moment later it is at the top of the list.

Three kinds go in:

Text. Anything you copy as text, from a word to a whole document.
Images. Screenshots and anything else copied as a picture, kept as the picture itself.
Files. Files you copy in a file manager, kept with their contents so you can get them back.

Each one has its own switch, so you can have Relic keep your text and leave your screenshots alone.

Settings › Capture

Capture text

Settings › Capture › Capture text: toggle, default on.

Capture images

Settings › Capture › Capture images: toggle, default on.

Capture files

Settings › Capture › Capture files: toggle, default on.

The Relic window with four items in the list: a line of text from a supplier letter, a link, a screenshot from a phone, and a PDF file. Each row shows what kind of thing it is, the device it came from, how long ago, and its tags. Four captures in a row: text, a link, an image and a file.

Copying files

When you copy a file in a file manager, your computer only puts the file's location on the clipboard. Relic goes and reads the file, so the item you get holds the real thing. You can drag it into an email weeks later, on this computer or another one.

Copy several files at once and each one becomes its own item. Relic takes up to twenty from a single copy.

A file bigger than the size limit is kept as its location instead of its contents. You still get an item you can search and find, and Relic tags it path so you can tell the two apart. Raise the limit and the next copy keeps the file itself.

Bold, links and colours

Text you copy out of a web page or a document usually carries formatting with it. Relic remembers the bold, the links, the lists and the tables alongside the plain words, so a paste later looks the way it did when you copied it. The plain text is always kept too, and it is always the version Relic searches.

This is Settings › Capture › Keep formatting, and it is on to start with. Bold, links and colours explains what survives a paste and what gets stripped.

What Relic never captures

Some copies never enter Relic at all. Nothing is recorded, so there is nothing for you to go back and delete.

Anything an app marks as sensitive.Password managers put a hint on the clipboard that says "do not keep this". Relic reads that hint on Windows, on a Mac and on Linux, and skips the copy.
Anything from an app on your blocklist. You can name apps yourself. See Never capture from an app.
Anything at all, while capture is paused. See Pause capture.

A copy that does come in but looks like a key, a token or a card number is kept and hidden behind dots instead. See Secrets.

When something is too big

Relic skips a capture over the size limit rather than filling your vault with one enormous item. The limit is yours to set.

Max item size

Skip captures larger than this. Bigger files are kept as a path only.

Settings › Capture › Max item size: 1 to 100 MB, default 100 MB.

This is the one skip Relic does tell you about, because a missing capture is easy to mistake for a broken one:

Too large to capture

The limit is 100 MB. You can raise it in Settings.

You will see it at most once an hour, however many big things you copy in between. Files are the exception described above: over the limit they are kept as a location rather than dropped.

Your plan also sets a ceiling on how big a single item can be once it syncs, so raising this slider past what your plan allows will not get a bigger item onto your other devices. Settings: Capture lists every row in this pane.