Yesterday a small browser tool shipped that fixes one of the most annoying parts of working with ChatGPT and Claude: screenshots that get misread.
You paste in a shot of a dashboard or a stack trace, and the model latches onto the wrong button, the wrong log line, the wrong panel, then you burn five minutes writing a paragraph to correct it. I’ve lost entire debugging sessions to that exact loop, re-explaining the same screenshot three different ways until the model finally looks where I meant.
u/NicheProfessor hit that wall enough times to stop writing prompts and build a fix instead, calling it Lookhere: a tool whose entire job is making a screenshot explain itself before it ever reaches the AI.
Here’s the twist. Most people assume the fix for “AI misread my screenshot” is a smarter prompt. It’s not. One commenter in the thread nailed it, calling it “Paint Engineering”: draw an arrow, drop a number, and the model sees exactly what you’re pointing at instead of parsing a paragraph of description. That’s not a workaround, it’s actually how multimodal models reason best. Text tells the model what to look for, but a mark on the image tells it where, and where beats a paragraph every time. That thirty-second Paint trick has always worked. Lookhere just makes it fast enough that you’ll actually bother doing it every time you paste something in.
The Fast Way To Annotate a Screenshot
- 📋 Paste straight from clipboard with Ctrl/Cmd+V. No file picker, no upload, no download.
- 🔢 Drop numbered markers (1, 2, 3) on the parts you want read in order. This fixes the model’s sequential reasoning instead of leaving it to guess which panel comes first, which matters most on dashboards where three things went wrong at once.
- 🎯 Highlight the exact button, log line, or panel that matters, so everything else fades into “ignore this.”
- 📎 Copy the annotated image straight back to your clipboard. Zero extra clicks, no export menu.
- Paste into ChatGPT or Claude and skip the three-paragraph explanation you used to type out.
No sign-up, no ads, and it runs entirely in your browser, so the screenshot never leaves your machine before it hits the AI you’re pasting it into. That’s worth pausing on: a lot of “quick” browser tools quietly round-trip your image through a server first, resizing it, storing it, maybe even logging it, before it ever reaches you. This one doesn’t, which matters if your screenshots ever include internal dashboards, customer data, or anything else you wouldn’t want sitting on someone else’s storage. It also means there’s no upload spinner to wait on, which sounds small until you’re pasting your fifth screenshot of the session and every second of friction starts to add up.
Why this matters beyond one tool: the actual bottleneck in a lot of AI workflows isn’t the model’s intelligence, it’s how much of your intent survives the trip from your head to the input box. A numbered, highlighted screenshot carries more of that intent than a paragraph does, and it costs you less time to make. Every minute you spend re-explaining a screenshot is a minute you’re not spending on the actual problem. Think about how many times you’ve typed some version of “no, the OTHER button, the one on the left” into a chat window. That sentence disappears the moment you can just point.
Pro tip: stack the numbers with the highlight tool for bug reports. Number the steps that led to the error, then circle the exact line where it broke. The model gets your whole story in one image instead of five follow-up messages walking it back through what you already told it. This works especially well for reproducing intermittent bugs, where the order you clicked things in actually matters and a wall of text tends to bury that order instead of preserving it.
Second pro tip: use it before a code review or a design critique too, not just for bugs. Number the UI elements you want feedback on, and the model responds to your priorities instead of narrating the whole screen back to you before getting to the part you actually care about. Same trick works for pull request screenshots dropped into Slack for a teammate, or for a support ticket where you need someone non-technical to look at exactly the right cell in a spreadsheet.
Worth flagging before you commit to it: Lookhere doesn’t keep any history. Every annotation lives only as long as your clipboard. If you want a running log of screenshots with timestamps instead of a one-shot fix, u/ZyberZeon mentioned building something similar that saves everything from desktop and mobile, plus the source URL, time, and place when it’s captured from the web. Worth a look if archiving matters more to you than speed.
If you already pay for Snagit, you already know the trick. u/CrucibleConservatory put it simply: draw an arrow at the problem and move on. Lookhere’s pitch is doing that same job for free, with zero setup, in the time it takes to hit paste instead of opening a whole separate app. For anyone bouncing between a free ChatGPT tab and Claude all day, that’s the difference between a tool you reach for once a month and one you use on every single screenshot.
Go paste something. 🚀 The original discussion is still live on r/PromptEngineering if you want to see what other annotation tools people are running alongside this one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does annotating screenshots actually help AI understand what I’m pointing at?
Yes, significantly. Based on user feedback, adding arrows and comments can cut your explanation overhead roughly in half. AI vision models process visual cues (arrows, highlights, step numbers) much faster than parsing text descriptions, so a 30-second annotation often saves minutes of back-and-forth clarification.
Q: Is Lookhere open source?
Not open source, but it’s free to use with no sign-up required, no ads, and no data collection. It runs entirely in your browser, so you get full privacy and control over your screenshots.
Q: Should I use Paint or invest in dedicated tools like Snagit?
For AI annotation, simple usually wins. Paint or a browser-based tool takes seconds to add arrows or highlights and delivers massive clarity gains. Dedicated tools offer more features (history, watermarking, advanced editing), but for most workflows, the friction-free simplicity of a basic annotator is actually better, annotate, copy, paste into AI, and move on.
Q: What features would make annotation tools even more powerful?
Some power users add screenshot history, automatic project organization, mobile capture, and design analysis to catalog UI patterns for research. If you’re managing screenshots at scale, a local custom tool might save time. For everyday use, though, a simple annotator covers the core need.
Best way to use screenshots with ChatGPT & Claude
by u/NicheProfessor in PromptEngineering