Introduction
In this lesson, we’ll talk about the Web Clipper. This is a browser extension that allows us to save links and content from web pages directly to our Notion workspace. Many Notion users are not even aware that it exists, but it’s still a pretty useful feature. Though with Flylighter and Notion AI now available, the Clipper looks very basic in comparison. Still, let’s dive in!
Copy link to headingDesktop clipper
On desktop, the Clipper is a browser extension you can download for Chrome (and any Chromium-based browser), Firefox, and Safari from this website. Once downloaded and added to your browser, you can click the “N” logo that will appear on your browser’s extension bar to initialize the Clipper. (If you’re not familiar how extensions work in your browser, there are plenty of guides online available).
If you’re not logged into Notion in the browser, the Clipper will first prompt you to log in. If you are, you will proceed directly to the clipper’s interface.
The clipper’s interface is very straightforward – you can modify the title of the page being saved, and then choose the workspace and page/database the page is being saved to. If you choose a page, then the clipped webpage will be saved as a subpage (page block) on that destination page. If you choose a database, the page will become an entry in the database. Unfortunately, we can’t modify any properties when saving a page with the Clipper.
Some pages will get the actual contents of the page clipped and save to Notion as blocks – while other will not. Most text-heavy websites, such as Wikipedia, news websites, or blogs, are always captured by the Clipper well. If the extension is not able to grab contents from a webpage, it will save just the title and the web URL.
Copy link to headingMobile clipper
On mobile, the clipper is already built-in to the mobile Notion app. If you have the app downloaded, then try sharing a webpage from your phone’s browser using the Share menu, and then choosing Notion as the destination.
That will open a similarly looking menu to the one from desktop, and will allow you to save pages from your phone as well. If you can’t find the Notion icon in your phone’s share menu, consult online how to make sure it shows up on the list. Other than that, the functionality of the mobile clipper is exactly the same as desktop.
Copy link to headingLimitations (and why Flylighter is better)
As you might have noticed by now, the default Web Clipper form Notion is very limited – we can’t select properties while saving, nor can we decide to clip a specific part of a webpage – it’s pretty much a limited black box with little control.
And that’s why we built Flylighter – the best and most powerful web clipper for Notion. Flylighter lets you do everything that the Web Clipper can’t. We’ll talk about Flylighter in greater detail just now in our next lesson!