Save Webpages You Visit - ONA.UNO Docs

The Goal

You browse the web and encounter articles, documentation, reference pages, or other content worth saving. You want these pages to become part of your personal knowledge base — searchable, summarized, and ready to surface when relevant.

There are different levels of preservation:

Fast capture: Save the main content of a webpage as clean, readable text
Perfect archive: Keep an exact copy of the page, images included, available offline even if the original disappears

ONA.UNO supports both approaches, plus a third option using screenshots for visual content or pages that resist text extraction.

Screen with browsers on Desktop: Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera-Browser and Brave

Building Blocks

Option 1: ONA.UNO Clipper (Recommended for Most Use Cases)

ONA.UNO provides browser extensions for quick, clean captures of web content.

Supported Browsers:

Chrome-based browsers: Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Vivaldi, Chromium, Comet, Dia
Safari (macOS)

How It Works:

Install the ONA.UNO Clipper for your browser
When viewing a page you want to save, click the ONA.UNO Clipper icon (or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+Y / Ctrl+Shift+Y)
A toast notification confirms the save
The page appears in your ONA.UNO timeline within seconds

What Gets Captured:

The extension extracts the main article content and converts it to clean Markdown. It uses the same excellent extraction engine as the Obsidian Web Clipper, so if you’re familiar with that tool, you know what to expect — most pages work well, though some heavily dynamic or paywalled sites may produce incomplete results.

Keyboard Shortcut:

Cmd+Shift+Y (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+Y (Windows/Linux) saves the current page instantly.

Starring on Capture:

After saving, the toast notification offers a star button. Click it to mark the item as starred immediately.

Set scope

Clips are saved into your currently selected Set. If you keep multiple libraries, switch Sets first so the clip ends up in the right place. See Sets (Libraries).

YouTube Videos: Full Transcript Support

When you clip a YouTube video, ONA.UNO does something special: it automatically fetches the full transcript and uses it as the primary content.

What This Means:

Searchable videos: Find that tutorial where someone explained a specific concept — search for the words they said
Full transcript preserved: The complete transcript is stored, with timestamps for each segment
AI-powered summary: ONA.UNO generates a structured summary with clickable timestamps that jump directly to that moment in the video
Chat with videos: Ask questions about video content and get answers with timestamp references you can click to verify

How It Works:

Navigate to any YouTube video
Click the ONA.UNO Clipper (or Cmd+Shift+Y)
The extension opens the transcript panel, captures all segments with timestamps, and saves everything to ONA.UNO
Within seconds, you have a searchable, summarizable record of the video

Timestamps Everywhere:

The summary includes timestamps like [02:45] that link directly to that point in the video
When you chat about a YouTube video, the AI includes timestamps in its answers
Click any timestamp to open YouTube at exactly that moment

When Transcripts Aren’t Available:

Some videos don’t have transcripts (auto-generated or manual). In these cases, ONA.UNO saves the video metadata and title, but there’s no text content to search or summarize. The item still appears in your timeline as a record of what you watched.

Option 2: SingleFile Extension (For Perfect Offline Copies)

If you need exact copies of webpages — with all images, styles, and formatting preserved — use the SingleFile extension alongside ONA.UNO.

What SingleFile Does:

SingleFile captures a complete snapshot of any webpage as a single HTML file. Everything is embedded: images, fonts, CSS. The result works offline and looks exactly like the original, even if the source disappears.

Install SingleFile:

Workflow:

Save pages with SingleFile — they download to your Downloads folder
Move the HTML files to a folder you’ve added as a Folder source in ONA.UNO
ONA.UNO automatically processes them: extracts the readable text, generates summaries, and makes the content searchable

Best of Both Worlds:

With this approach, you get the full archive (the HTML file on your disk) plus ONA.UNO’s AI processing (summaries, tags, semantic search). The original HTML stays exactly as captured.

When to Use Which:

Scenario	ONA.UNO Clipper	SingleFile
Article save	Yes	—
Need images/layout preserved	—	Yes
Page might disappear	Yes (text)	Yes (everything)
Research archive	Yes	Yes
Fast capture	Yes	—

Understanding the Trade-offs:

The ONA.UNO Clipper extracts the article text and converts it to clean Markdown. This text is saved permanently in ONA.UNO — even if the original page disappears, you keep the full content. However, images are referenced by URL, not downloaded. They display in the Original view as long as they remain online, but if the source removes them, they’re gone.

SingleFile takes the opposite approach: it downloads and embeds everything — images, fonts, CSS — into a single HTML file. The result is a perfect offline snapshot that looks exactly like the original, regardless of what happens to the source. The trade-off is larger file sizes and slightly slower capture.

File Size Note

SingleFile HTML files can be large (several MB per page) because they embed all images. For high-volume capture, the ONA.UNO Clipper produces smaller items since it stores only the text content.

Pro Tip — Automate with Hazel

Browser extensions can only save to your Downloads folder — they can’t write directly to other locations. If you find yourself frequently moving HTML files to your Folder source, consider using Hazel to automate this. Hazel watches folders and moves files based on rules you define. A simple rule like “move .html files containing SingleFile to ~/Documents/Web Archives/” turns SingleFile into a true one-click capture. The same trick works for screenshots.

Option 3: Screenshots (For Visual Content)

Some content is best captured visually — complex diagrams, infographics, or pages that don’t extract cleanly.

Workflow:

Take a screenshot (macOS: Cmd+Shift+4 for selection, Cmd+Shift+3 for full screen)
Move the screenshot to a folder you’ve added as a Folder source in ONA.UNO
ONA.UNO automatically runs OCR (optical character recognition) to extract all visible text
The extracted text becomes searchable and available for AI processing

Pro Tip:

Consider adding your Screenshots folder directly as a Folder source in ONA.UNO. Every screenshot you take will automatically flow into your timeline.

What Gets Extracted:

ONA.UNO’s OCR handles printed text, handwriting, and even text embedded in images or diagrams. The extraction is thorough — you’ll be able to search for any text visible in the screenshot.

What Happens in ONA.UNO

Once captured, all items — whether from the browser extension, HTML files, or screenshots — flow into your timeline and receive the same AI processing:

Automatic Enrichment:

Embeddings: Vector representations for semantic search
Summary: A concise summary you can scan at a glance
Title: An intelligent title extracted from the content
Tags: Relevant tags suggested based on the content

Timeline Integration:

Items appear chronologically in your unified timeline
Browse by day to see everything you captured
Day summaries include your web captures alongside notes, emails, and other content

Search:

Full-text search across all captured content
Semantic search finds relevant items even without exact keyword matches
Filter by source type or date range

Chat:

Ask questions about your captured content
“What articles did I save about X?”
“Summarize the research I collected last week”
Chat understands context from your entire knowledge base

Where Your Data Lives

Understanding where captured content is stored helps you manage backups:

Files You Control Directly

HTML files and screenshots in Folder sources live on your disk in the folders you specified. ONA.UNO only reads these files — it never modifies or deletes them. Your files remain yours, independent of ONA.UNO.

Content Managed by ONA.UNO

Browser Clips (from the ONA.UNO Clipper) work differently. When you clip a page, the content is ingested directly into ONA.UNO’s database. There’s no source file on your disk that you can manage separately.

This means Browser Clips require explicit backup if you want to preserve them outside ONA.UNO.

Backing Up Browser Clips

To create an independent backup of all your Browser Clips:

Open ONA.UNO
Go to Settings (⌘,) → Maintenance
In the Browser Clips section, click Export Browser Clips…
Choose a destination folder

What Gets Exported:

ONA.UNO creates one Markdown file per clip, containing:

The original URL and capture timestamp
The extracted content
AI-generated title, summary, and tags

These files are portable — you can open them in any text editor, import them into other apps, or simply keep them as an archive.

Import:

If you need to restore from a backup or move clips to another ONA.UNO installation:

Go to Settings → Maintenance → Browser Clips
Click Import Browser Clips…
Select the folder containing your exported Markdown files

ONA.UNO will import the clips while skipping any that already exist (no duplicates).

Recommended Setup

For comprehensive web capture, consider this combination:

Install the ONA.UNO Clipper in your primary browser for fast, everyday captures
Add your Documents or a dedicated “Archives” folder as a Folder source
Install SingleFile for those important pages you want preserved exactly
Optionally add your Screenshots folder as a Folder source for visual captures

With this setup, you have multiple ways to capture web content, and everything flows into your unified ONA.UNO timeline.

Reference

Method	Install	Capture	Where Stored	Backup
ONA.UNO Clipper	Extension for your browser	Click icon or `Cmd+Shift+Y`	ONA.UNO database	Export via Settings → Maintenance
SingleFile	Extension for your browser	Click icon, move file to Folder source	Your disk	Already on disk
Screenshots	Built into macOS	`Cmd+Shift+4`, move to Folder source	Your disk	Already on disk