I built Snipworth a Chrome extension to turn code into shareable images — and keep them for later

AlexTDev Posted on May 30 I built Snipworth a Chrome extension to turn code into shareable images — and keep them for later # showdev # opensource # webdev # programming If you share code on social media, you've probably used Carbon, ray.so, or Snappify at some point. They turn a snippet into a nice image, you download it, you post it. That's where they stop. The thing I kept running into wasn't generating the image — it was everything around it. I'd write a snippet I wanted to post, but not right now. I'd tweak the colors, get it looking good, then have nowhere to put it. Next time I needed it, it was gone, and I'd start over. So I built Snipworth : a Chrome extension that turns code into polished images, but treats the snippet itself as something worth keeping. It's on the Chrome Web Store at v1.1.0, open-source under MIT. Why build yet another code-screenshot tool? Two reasons, honestly. The first was practical. I post code on X and LinkedIn fairly often, and the generate-download-post loop never fit how I actually work. I wanted a place to draft snippets — write one now, refine it later, keep a few around just for myself — instead of treating every image as throwaway. The second was learning. I had never built a browser extension, never touched Manifest V3, never published anything on the Chrome Web Store. Rather than a throwaway tutorial project, I picked a real problem I had and built the whole thing end to end — domain model, UI, export pipeline, CI, store submission. The existing landscape looked like this: Carbon / ray.so — great-looking output, web-based, but stateless. No library, no persistence, nothing social-media-aware beyond the image. Snappify — feature-rich and polished, but commercial and account-based. Editor extensions (CodeSnap & co.) — handy inside one editor, but tied to it. The gap I went for: an open-source, local-first browser extension where generating the image is just one step, and the real product is managing your snippets — code,