Pause, exclude & delete

What Selv observes

Screen capture, audio and activity each have their own controls in Settings › Capture. Captured content is stored locally. Optional cloud-model requests and connected AI tools can receive context you choose to share; see How your data stays on your Mac.

Pausing capture

Use the Recall page's tools menu (see Recall) to pause or resume screen capture on demand, without changing your settings.

Excluding an app

Open Excluded Apps from Capture settings to keep specific apps out of screen capture entirely, and turn on Exclude private browsing to skip incognito and private windows automatically.

Background indexing

A separate toggle lets background indexing run only while your Mac is charging, idle, and on a full or high battery — useful for finishing overnight without touching your battery during the day. Turning it off doesn't stop indexing; queued work simply isn't deferred to those conditions.

Deleting your data

Settings › Storage has a dedicated Delete data section — controls that ask for confirmation before removing local data. Selv does not keep a server copy for recovery. Backups you maintain separately may still contain deleted data; see Backups. From there you can clear all captured audio and transcripts in one action, or remove old migration leftovers.

There's no button today for deleting a single screenshot or moment from Recall. To remove older screenshots specifically, shorten the image-retention window in Capture settings (see Recall) — shortening the image window does not itself remove the extracted text and search context for that period.