Browser extension

Install

Not covered: mobile browsers (no desktop extensions) and Safari on iPhone or iPad (no Teserra there yet).

Connect

1. In Teserra, open Settings (⌘,) → General → Browser clipper and click Copy token. The token is the only thing that lets the extension talk to your library.
2. Open the extension's Options (right-click the icon, or the popup's Connect step). Paste the token, leave the port at 8788, save.
3. Your browser asks once for access to all sites. Accept: this is what lets Quick save work on every page. The extension still sends to your Mac only. Safari manages site access in its own Settings → Websites.

Quick save: Option-click anything

Hold ⌥ and move over a page: the image or video under the cursor gets a frame and a label, “Save image to Teserra” or “Save video to Teserra”. Click, and it is in your library with the page as its source. A toast in the page confirms: “Saved to Teserra”.

What it catches

• Images, including images inside links and CSS background images (a Pinterest board, an Are.na channel, a shop grid).
• Video files served directly (a .mp4 in a page). Up to 100 MB.
• Tweet videos: click the video in a post on X and Teserra resolves the MP4 itself.

What it refuses, and says so

• Streams: a YouTube, Vimeo or Instagram player is a stream, not a file. The toast says “This video is streamed and cannot be saved”. Save the page as a link instead.
• Videos over 100 MB: “This video is over 100 MB”.

Options

• Quick save on or off. On by default. Off returns the site permission to the browser; the popup and the right-click menu keep working.
• Modifier: ⌥ by default. Option-click on a link normally downloads it; on an image or a video, Teserra takes the click. Pick ⌥⇧ if you rely on the browser's Option-click download.
• Option-click on a link with no media keeps the browser's behavior.

The popup: Save as Image, Link or Article

Click the extension icon. A preview of the page appears with three ways to save it.

• Image. A screenshot of the visible tab, or the page's share image (the one social networks show). Toggle between the two on the preview.
• Link. A card with preview, favicon, title and site. In Teserra, ↵ opens it in the browser and Space peeks at the live page in a Teserra window. Dead links get a badge later.
• Article. The readable text of the page, extracted and kept as clean Markdown, readable offline in Teserra's reading view and searchable. X threads work too, and their videos are saved locally.

Below the modes: Title (prefilled), Note, Tags (autocompleted from your library after three characters), Collection (your collections, nested). Then Save to Teserra or ⌘↩. The item appears in the grid instantly, and the Curator catalogs it if auto-curation is on.

Appearance: light by default like Teserra, dark, or follow macOS, in the options.

Right click: Send image to Teserra

On any image, right-click → Send image to Teserra. The app downloads it in the background with the page as referer, so images that refuse hotlinking still come through. A badge on the icon confirms, plus a system notification in Chrome and Firefox. Safari shows the badge and the toast only. This is the way to go if you keep Quick save off.

Per browser

If an add-on is off

Links and Articles are add-ons in Teserra. If one is switched off, the extension tells you (“Links are turned off in Teserra”) instead of failing silently. Turn it back on in Settings → Add-ons.

Privacy, in one paragraph

The extension talks to one address, 127.0.0.1:8788, your own Mac, with the token you pasted. It reads a page only when you act: a click on the icon, a right-click, an Option-click. It collects nothing, sends nothing to us or to anyone else. The privacy policy says the same in longer words.