Help & Documentation

Getting started

What Submerse is

Submerse is a bookmarking app for links, images, PDFs and notes, for one person or a few people together. Save something and Submerse fills in its title, then, unless you turn AI off, summarizes or describes it and labels it. File it into pools, share a pool when you want company, and search everything you’ve kept when you need it back.

Getting an account

Anyone can make an account. Create an account with your email or with Google. If you use your email, Submerse emails you to confirm your address. After that, sign in the same way on the web, in the browser extension or in the iPhone app. Sign up with an email on the website, though: the iPhone app can’t finish an email sign-up yet.

Right after you sign up on the website, we ask once about product updates and tips: what’s new in Submerse, tips for getting more out of it, and, a few days after you join, a note about the browser extension if you haven’t saved anything with it yet. The box starts unticked; tick it if you’d like them. Sign up in the iPhone app and you won’t get them until you turn on “Product updates and tips” in Settings → Profile on the website.

Without a plan, an account can hold 20 bookmarks. To try everything, start the 14-day free trial from Settings → Billing (see Pricing and billing).

Finding your way around

• The column on the left lists your pools: All Bookmarks, Favorites, the pools you’ve made, the ones shared with you and the public pools you follow.
• Above your bookmarks: list, grid or feed view, search, the + button for adding, and, in a pool, the share button.
• Click a bookmark to open its sidebar on the right: its title, notes, labels and pools, and a More actions (…) menu.
• Feed view has no sidebar. Each post shows its pools, labels and notes underneath it. Click a link’s title to open the page, or a picture to open the gallery.
• Look is a pool every account has, so its posts are in your All Bookmarks. If you’d rather not see it, right-click Look in the sidebar and choose Leave. You can add it back from submerse.it/look. A pool someone shared with you can be left the same way (see Sharing a pool).
• The Submerse logo opens the app menu: Settings, Theme, Import/Export, Trash, Help, Report a Bug and more. ⌘ + K (Ctrl+K elsewhere) opens the command menu.

Submerse works in a phone’s browser too. There, the logo opens your pools, and the menu sits at the foot of that list.

Saving

In the web app

• Paste a link. Copy a URL and press ⌘ + V (Ctrl+V elsewhere) while you’re looking at your bookmarks and no text field is selected.
• Click + beside the search bar and pick one. “Paste URL” saves the link you copied. “Add URL manually” lets you type a link and notes, then click “Add Bookmark”. “Upload image / PDF / audio” picks files to upload. “Add Note” opens a box for writing a note; click “Save note” when you’re done.
• Drag images, PDFs or voice recordings onto the page.

Paste, drop or click + while you’re in a pool and the bookmark goes into that pool too. In a pool you can only view, it’s saved to All Bookmarks instead, and Submerse tells you so.

Images can be JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, TIFF or BMP. Images and PDFs can be up to 50 MB each, and Submerse keeps them at full resolution. HEIC images are converted to JPEG as they upload, and AVIF images usually to WebP. A voice recording can be M4A (what the iPhone’s Voice Memos makes), MP3 or WAV, also up to 50 MB. A video can’t be uploaded, even an MP4 that holds only sound; export it as M4A, MP3 or WAV.

Chrome extension

Install the Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store, then sign in with your Submerse account. On any page, click the Submerse icon in the toolbar: that saves the page to All Bookmarks. Then, if you like, tick the pools to put it in (search for one, or type a new name to create it); each tick takes effect at once. Saved it by mistake? Click “Undo” and it’s removed. On a page you’ve saved before, the popup shows which pools it’s in, and nothing is saved twice. On Submerse’s own pages it asks before saving.

To keep an image, right-click it and choose “Save image to Submerse”. That saves the image itself to All Bookmarks, with no popup, and remembers the page it came from. The first time an image is hosted on a different site from its page, Chrome asks to give Submerse access to all websites, which it uses only to download the images you save and read their descriptions (alt text). Once you allow it, Chrome won’t ask again. The extension follows your Submerse theme.

iOS app

The iOS app is a beta on TestFlight. Use the share sheet in Safari, Photos, Mail or another app to save links, images and PDFs. You can share several photos or PDFs at once; a batch finishes uploading the next time you open Submerse. They land in All Bookmarks, ready to file into pools. An Android app is coming in 2027.

Command line

submerse is a command-line client. It adds, lists, searches, moves, labels and trashes bookmarks from a terminal, with --json output for scripts. On a Mac (Apple silicon or Intel), install it with Homebrew: brew install godspeedsys/tap/submerse, and update it with brew upgrade submerse. It signs in through your browser with submerse auth login. Every command is listed in its README. There are no Linux or Windows builds yet.

Each sign-in creates a key, listed under “CLI access” in Settings → Profile. Revoke one there and that machine is signed out within two minutes.

Notes and voice notes

A note is a bookmark that links to nothing: just text. Write one with “Add Note” in the + menu, and click it in your list to read or edit it. There is no link to open.

A voice note is a recording you upload. Submerse sends the audio to a third-party transcription service, and puts the transcript at the top of the note, above anything you wrote yourself. The note says it is transcribing until the text is ready, and says why when it can’t be: no speech was found, this month’s transcription time is used up, or the recording is longer than 40 minutes. When trying again could help, the note offers a way to transcribe it again. The recording itself stays with the note; its “Audio file” link opens it in a new tab.

Transcription is part of Pro, and a trial includes some. It doesn’t depend on “Auto-enrich Bookmarks”: a recording you upload is sent for transcription whether that is on or off. Notes can’t be added to public pools yet.

What Submerse does with a save

Unless you’ve turned it off, Submerse reads each new save with AI and fills it in:

• A link: it fetches the page, sets the title, writes a short summary into the notes, and adds two to five labels, reusing labels you already have when they fit.
• An image: it describes it and labels it. For a picture of a page, a sign, a menu or a note, it reads out the text instead. The description is kept for search and isn’t added to the image’s notes, so a screenshot can still be found by the words in it. The iOS app finds it that way only while it’s online. It reads JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP; a TIFF or BMP uploaded on the website is kept but not described.
• A PDF: a summary, plus the title and authors from its cover page. It reads the first two pages, so the summary, labels and search words come from those.

YouTube, GitHub, Wikipedia, Hacker News and Stack Overflow links get the source’s own description instead of a summary. Reddit links get a title only.

Your own edits to a title or notes are never overwritten. If Submerse can’t read something, the bookmark’s sidebar says so beside Notes and offers Retry. Save a link you already have and Submerse doesn’t make a copy; it tells you when you first saved it.

Each plan includes a set number of enrichments a month (see Pricing and billing). To switch AI off, see AI and privacy.

Organizing

Pools

A pool is a collection. A bookmark can be in as many pools as you like. To make one, click “+ Pool” at the top of the pool list, or choose “New Pool” from the app menu, and give it a name.

Right-click a pool in the list for its Settings, Sharing and Delete. Deleting a pool doesn’t delete its bookmarks; they stay in All Bookmarks.

All Bookmarks and Favorites

Every account comes with two pools. All Bookmarks holds everything you’ve saved, plus the bookmarks in pools shared with you. Favorites holds what you’ve starred: click the star in a bookmark’s sidebar. Neither can be renamed, deleted or shared.

Adding bookmarks to pools

To add a bookmark to a pool:

• Drag it onto a pool in the list on the left.
• Right-click it and choose “Add to Pool…”. Right-click one of several selected bookmarks to add them all at once.
• Select bookmarks by ticking their checkboxes (Shift-click a second checkbox to select everything in between), then choose “Add to Pool” in the bar that appears. Ticking or unticking a pool there adds or removes the whole selection.
• In a bookmark’s sidebar, click “Add/Remove” under Pools.

To take a bookmark out of a pool, untick the pool in either of the last two places.

Putting a pool in order

In a pool you own or can edit, drag bookmarks to put them in your own order, in list or grid view. New bookmarks join at the top. All Bookmarks and Favorites can’t be reordered.

Labels

Labels are short tags on a bookmark, and Submerse adds them when it reads a save. To change a bookmark’s labels, open it from All Bookmarks or Favorites and click “Add/Remove” under Labels.

Inside any other pool, the sidebar shows that pool’s own labels instead. They belong to the pool, everyone in it sees them, and the pool’s editors can add, remove and create them.

Pools that fill themselves by label

A pool can add bookmarks for you. When you create or edit a pool, turn on “Auto-populate from labels” and pick one or more labels. Any bookmark with one of those labels joins the pool on its own, including ones you save later. A bookmark the pool added this way leaves on its own if it loses the label; one you added by hand stays until you remove it.

The labels a pool fills itself from are the bookmark’s own labels: the ones you see, add and remove when you open the bookmark from All Bookmarks or Favorites. On the website, inside any other pool, a bookmark shows that pool’s own labels instead, shared with everyone in the pool. Changing those doesn’t add a bookmark to the pool or take one out. The iOS app shows only the bookmark’s own labels, so a label you change there can add the bookmark to a pool like this, or take it out.

If you remove a bookmark from a pool like this, it stays out. The pool remembers that you took it out and won’t add it back for any of its labels, even if the bookmark still has them or gets them again later, and even if you change which labels the pool fills itself from. To undo that, add the bookmark to the pool again by hand. In a shared pool this holds for everyone: when anyone who can edit the pool removes a bookmark, the pool keeps it out for all of you.

Trash

To delete a bookmark, choose “Trash” from its right-click menu or “Move to Trash” from More actions (…) in its sidebar. With several selected, “Move to Trash” is in the bar. Open Trash from the app menu or the command menu to restore a bookmark, delete it forever, or empty the trash.

Search

How to search

Type in the search bar above your bookmarks, or press / to jump to it. Results update as you type and highlight what matched. On the website, when nothing matches exactly, search tries again and forgives a typo in a word of six letters or more. It shows the 50 best matches; add a word to bring closer matches to the top. Search looks inside the pool you’re in. From All Bookmarks it covers everything, including pools shared with you.

What search looks at

Search matches a bookmark’s title, its URL and its notes. Notes include what Submerse writes there: the summary of a page or PDF. Search also matches an image’s description and the text Submerse read in it, which are kept for search and not added to its notes. So a screenshot can be found by the words in it.

The iOS app searches the title, notes and address of the bookmarks on your phone. While it’s online it also asks Submerse’s search, the same one the website uses, and shows what that finds too, so it finds an image by its description. Offline it searches only your phone, and says so when nothing matches.

A public pool page’s search matches the title, notes and address of the bookmarks it shows, and an image’s description.

On the website, search also finds bookmarks with a label that starts with what you type, after the ones whose words match. So does the iOS app while it’s online; offline it doesn’t, and neither does a public pool page. No search looks inside the saved copy of a page.

Finding images by colour

On the website, in the command-line client and in the iOS app while it’s online, you can find an image by its colours. Search for “navy” or “red sofa” and images showing that colour come up, even when no title or note says the word. A colour also finds its shades, so “blue” finds navy and teal too.

Submerse picks out up to five main colours in each image you save. It does this on its own servers, whether or not AI is on, and never shows them. A colour has to fill a fair part of the picture to count, and pictures where it’s the main colour come first. On the website and in the command-line client, images found only by their colour are listed after the bookmarks whose words or labels match. Search on a public pool page, and in the iOS app while it’s offline, doesn’t use colours.

The colours it knows: red, orange, yellow, beige, brown, green, blue, purple, pink, grey (or gray), white and black, and the shades crimson, burgundy, coral, rust, peach, amber, mustard, cream, tan, chocolate, taupe, olive, lime, mint, sage, emerald, forest green, teal, turquoise, sky blue, cobalt, navy, lavender, plum, magenta, blush, hot pink, light grey and charcoal. A few other names work too, such as maroon, ivory, khaki, aqua and lilac.

Reading and viewing

Reading View

For most articles, Submerse keeps a clean, readable copy of the text, so the words outlast the link. Open the bookmark and choose “Reading View” from More actions (…) in its sidebar. Esc closes it. The iOS app has Reading View too.

Images in that copy still load from the original site. Not every page gets a copy: pages that aren’t articles, sites like YouTube, GitHub and Reddit, and links that no longer work don’t.

Notes and summaries

A bookmark’s notes are in its sidebar. Submerse writes its summary there, and you can add to it or rewrite it; your edits stay. An image is the exception: its description is kept for search and isn’t added to its notes. To have Submerse read a bookmark again, choose “Re-enrich” from More actions (…).

You can change what Submerse asks the AI to write. In Settings → Profile, under Enrichment prompts (shown while Auto-enrich Bookmarks is on), click Edit beside the Link, Image or PDF prompt.

Opening the original

Click a link’s title or address in its sidebar, choose “Go to link” from its right-click menu, or select it and press Enter. ⌘-click (Ctrl-click elsewhere) a bookmark in the list or grid to open it in a new tab.

PDFs

Click a PDF’s preview in its sidebar to read it full-screen. ← and → turn pages, ⌘ + = and ⌘ + - zoom, and Esc goes back.

Images and the gallery

Click an image’s preview in its sidebar to see it full-screen. In any pool other than All Bookmarks, press G or click the gallery button to browse its images. The arrow keys or J and K move between them, and Esc goes back.

To tidy an image you saved, open its right-click menu or More actions (…) and choose “Crop”, or “Text Document”, a clean-up filter for photos of pages. “Revert to Original”, in More actions, brings back the image as you saved it. A crop or a filter takes the image’s description out of search until you choose “Re-enrich”; reverting brings it back.

Copying and downloading images

On the website, right-click an image bookmark (one you uploaded, or a link to an image that Submerse saved as a picture) and choose “Copy image” to put it on your clipboard, or “Download image” to save the file. Anyone signed in who can see the image can do both, including viewers of a pool shared with them, once a new upload has finished processing. A public pool link has no Submerse menu, even for a signed-in visitor: its visitors get their browser’s own. A copied image pastes as a still picture, so an animated GIF pastes as its first frame; “Download image” saves the file itself, so a GIF stays animated. The iOS app doesn’t offer this yet.

Sharing

Sharing a pool

Share a pool you own with people by email:

1. Open the pool and click the share button next to + (or right-click the pool and choose Sharing).
2. Under “Share privately with”, enter their email addresses, separated by commas.
3. Turn on “Also allow them to edit” to let them add and remove bookmarks. Leave it off and they can only look.
4. Click “Share Pool”.

Each person gets an invitation by email, whether or not they have a Submerse account. Nothing is added to their Submerse until they accept it. Once they do, the pool appears in their pool list and its bookmarks in their All Bookmarks. Until then, “Currently Shared With” lists them as “Invited”, with the address you typed. You can switch anyone between Viewer and Editor, or remove them, invited or not. An invitation nobody answers expires after 30 days; sharing again sends a new one. All Bookmarks and Favorites can’t be shared.

When someone invites you, your invitations are in the sidebar under “Invitations”, and on the page the email links to, with Accept and Decline. Declining sends nobody a notification; the invitation just leaves the sender’s list. A personal message can be up to 500 characters.

Someone you share a pool with can leave it on the website. They right-click the pool in the sidebar (on a phone, they tap the pool’s actions button there) and choose Leave. What they added stays in the pool.

Submerse emails you about activity in shared pools: an invitation you sent accepted, permission changes, new bookmarks. Turn “Collaboration emails” off in Settings → Profile. Product updates and tips have a switch of their own there, “Product updates and tips”, and an unsubscribe link in every one; turning them off stops nothing else. Emails about your trial, your plan, payments and your account’s security are always sent.

A public pool shows each bookmark's title, link, picture and notes, AI summaries included, to anyone who has the link. Before you turn the link on, read the notes in that pool. Anything added to the pool later is public too, so turn the link off when you no longer want it shared.

Public links

You can also publish a pool you own. In its Sharing tab, turn on “Public link” and copy the short sbmr.se link. Anyone with it can open the pool without an account and look, but not change anything. They see it in the pool’s theme, with search and the image gallery. Turn “Public link” off to close it again.

Anyone signed in can follow a public pool from its page. It joins their sidebar, where they can look but not change anything, and its bookmarks join their All Bookmarks. Someone who isn’t signed in is asked to sign in or create an account first.

Its owner sees how many people follow it, but never who. Turn “Public link” off and every follow ends: the pool leaves its followers’ sidebars, and turning the link back on doesn’t bring them back. To stop following, right-click the pool in the sidebar on the website (on a phone, tap the pool’s actions button there) and choose Unfollow.

Import and export

Both live under Import/Export in the app menu.

Bringing bookmarks in

• “Import from Browser” takes a bookmarks file (.html) exported from Chrome, Edge or Firefox; the dialog shows how to make one. Each folder becomes a pool.
• “Import from CSV” takes a spreadsheet with a url column, and title and notes columns if you have them. The bookmarks go into the pool you’re in.
• “Import from Are.na” connects your Are.na account and lets you pick channels. Each channel becomes a private pool. Run it again later and it adds only what’s missing. The whole move, step by step, is on Moving from Are.na.

Imported links keep the titles they came with; Submerse doesn’t summarize or label them. Images and PDFs from Are.na, up to 50 MB each, are copied in and handled like any upload. Links come in as links to the page they point to. Any other file, such as audio or video, comes in as a link to its Are.na page (see Limits).

Taking them with you

• “Export to CSV” downloads a spreadsheet of your bookmarks: the date each was added, its title, URL and notes. It doesn’t include uploaded files, pools or the trash.
• “Export to Are.na” copies the pools you choose to your Are.na account as channels; bookmarks in no pool go to a channel called Unsorted. Run it again and it adds only what’s new. To send one pool, right-click it and choose “Export to Are.na…”. Text notes and voice notes aren’t sent yet; other bookmarks go with their notes.

Keyboard shortcuts

These work in the main view. Press ?, or choose “Learn Shortcuts” in the app menu, to see the main ones in the app.

On Windows and Linux, use Ctrl where you see ⌘. In the PDF viewer, ← and → turn pages and ⌘ + = and ⌘ + - zoom. In the gallery, the arrow keys or J and K move between images. Esc leaves both.

Settings

Your account

Open Settings from the app menu. It has four tabs: Profile, Themes, Billing and Affiliate. Profile holds your name and email, CLI access, your email notifications (“Collaboration emails” and “Product updates and tips”), the AI switch and your enrichment prompts.

To change your email, enter the new address on Profile and confirm it with the code we send. To change your password, sign out and use “Forgot password?” on the sign-in page.

Themes

Submerse comes in seven themes: Communion, Protection, Midnight, Iceland, Rose, Ocean and Sand. Choose one in Settings → Themes, from Theme in the app menu, or by typing its name in the command menu. Your choice is saved to your account, so the web app shows it wherever you sign in, and the Chrome extension follows it.

To make your own, click “New theme” under Custom themes, and its editor opens below. In a theme’s editor, “Export” saves it as a .json file and “Import” adds a .json file as a new theme.

A pool can carry a theme too. Its owner picks one under “Pool theme” in the pool’s Settings, and visitors to its public link see it. To see it yourself, turn on “Use in my view”. People you share the pool with see their own theme.

AI and privacy

AI enrichment is on by default. To turn it off, switch off “Auto-enrich Bookmarks” in Settings → Profile. With it off, Submerse writes no summaries and adds no labels to new bookmarks, and no page text goes to the AI provider, Anthropic’s Claude. The privacy policy has the details.

Voice notes are the exception to that switch. A recording you upload is sent to a third-party service to be transcribed whether or not Auto-enrich Bookmarks is on. The privacy policy names the service.

Deleting your account

At the bottom of Settings → Profile, click “Delete Everything” and type your email address to confirm. That removes every bookmark, with its notes, files and reading copy; your pools, including ones you’ve shared, so the people you shared them with, and anyone following them, lose access; which public pools you follow; and your labels, themes and settings. It can’t be undone. You can also delete your account from the iOS app.

If your plan renews (a trial included), cancel it first from “Manage subscription” in Settings → Billing. Submerse won’t delete an account whose plan is still set to renew.

Want a copy first? Use Export to CSV (see Taking them with you).

Pricing and billing

Free trial

Try Pro free for 14 days, no card needed. To start, click “Start free trial” in Settings → Billing, which also shows when your trial ends. The app menu counts down the days. When the trial ends, if a card is on your account, Pro continues and the card is charged. If not, your account moves to the free plan and you aren’t charged.

Pro

Pro is $8/month, billed monthly. It lifts the 20-bookmark limit and includes 555 enrichments a month. Submerse uses one each time it reads a bookmark: a new save, a Retry or a Re-enrich.

Settings → Billing shows how many enrichments you’ve used this month. Past 555 in a month, new bookmarks still save with their title, but Submerse doesn’t read them (see Limits). Cancel any time from “Manage subscription” on the same page; Pro lasts until the end of what you’ve paid for. If Billing says “Pro — Complimentary”, there’s nothing to pay.

Discount codes

Have a discount code? If it came in a link, sign up from the link: the code is applied for you once your account is made, and you’ll see what it gives before you add a card. Otherwise, use “Have a discount code?” in Settings → Billing once you’ve signed up. Pro needs a card on file to start; with a code that makes your first payments free, nothing is charged until they run out, and you can cancel before then. A code starts Pro, so it can’t be added to a plan you already have.

Without a plan

An account without a plan can hold 20 bookmarks and gets 20 enrichments a month. Every bookmark you own counts, trashed and imported ones included. Settings → Billing shows how many bookmarks are left. At 20 you can still open everything; adding more needs Pro.

Limits

A few limits keep Submerse quick and fair for everyone. Most people never meet one. Here are the limits you can meet, how big each one is, and what happens when you reach it.

What your plan includes

• Without a plan: 20 bookmarks and 20 enrichments a month. Voice notes are not transcribed.
• Free trial: the same as Pro for 14 days, with 30 minutes of voice note transcription a month.
• Pro: no bookmark limit, 555 enrichments a month, and 5 hours of voice note transcription a month.
• Pro — Complimentary: no bookmark or enrichment limit, and 10 hours of voice note transcription a month.

A month is a calendar month in UTC, so enrichments and transcription time start again at midnight UTC on the 1st. The 20 bookmarks of no plan don’t: every bookmark you own counts for as long as you own it. What you’ve used in a month counts against whatever plan you have: if a trial or a plan ends partway through a month, the enrichments already used that month count toward the 20 of no plan. If a renewal payment fails, your account has the limits of no plan until the payment goes through.

Each time Submerse reads a bookmark it uses one enrichment: a new save, a Retry or a Re-enrich. A read that fails still counts; only a link to a web page that answers “not found” gives its enrichment back. Notes and voice notes use none. Re-enriching or retrying a bookmark someone else added to a shared pool uses their enrichments, not yours.

Past your month’s enrichments, new bookmarks still save with a title (for a YouTube video or a Reddit post, only the site’s name), but Submerse doesn’t read them: links get no summary, labels or Reading View copy, and images and PDFs get no description or searchable text. Re-enrich them once the month starts again.

Settings → Billing shows the enrichments you’ve used this month and, without a plan, how many bookmarks are left. It doesn’t show transcription time yet. More about each plan is under Pricing and billing.

How fast you can do things

A few actions can only be repeated so fast. Each allows a quick run first and then a steady pace, and waiting is enough: nothing is lost. Past one, Submerse asks you to try again shortly. Topic suggestions and “Get the Submerse iOS app” also say how long to wait, and uploads from the website wait their turn by themselves.

• Uploading files: 300 right away, then one every two seconds.
• Cropping or replacing an image: 20 right away, then one a minute.
• “Transcribe again” on a voice note: 3 right away, then 10 a day, across all your voice notes.
• Topic suggestions when you set up: 5 right away, then one every 6 minutes, and no more than 20 a day. What you type can be 500 characters at most.
• “Get the Submerse iOS app” in the Welcome dialog: twice, then once every 8 hours.
• Following a public pool: 20 right away, then one every two minutes.

Sharing a pool by email is counted by the day instead: 200 addresses a day with a plan or the free trial, and 10 a day without one, starting again at midnight UTC. Every address in a share counts, including people already on Submerse and addresses you’ve invited before, and a share that would go past your number isn’t sent at all. Share with fewer people, or wait for the next day.

Public pages

• A public pool page shows its first 500 bookmarks. If the pool holds more, the page says so, and its search looks only through the ones shown.
• Anyone who isn’t signed in can load public pool pages 30 times a minute, in a run of up to 60, from one network address. Searching or opening bookmarks inside a page you have loaded doesn’t count. Past that the page says “Too many requests from this location” until, a moment later, the pool fills in by itself. Signed-in people and Look aren’t limited.

Voice notes

• A recording can be up to 50 MB, and is transcribed up to 40 minutes. One Submerse can tell is longer is kept but not transcribed; one whose length it can’t read is sent anyway, and all of it counts toward your month.
• Three of your recordings are transcribed at once. The rest wait their turn for up to about 10 minutes, and one still waiting after that stops and offers “Transcribe again”.
• Each recording gets three tries at transcription in all, counting the ones Submerse makes by itself. After the third it can’t be transcribed again, however long you wait. Only the person who added a recording can transcribe it again.
• A transcript has to fit in the note’s 50,000 characters along with what you wrote, so a very long one is cut short and the note says so. If what you wrote leaves no room at all, the transcript is left out.
• If a transcription fails partway, the time it may have used still counts toward your month. For a recording whose length Submerse couldn’t read, that is up to 40 minutes.

Sizes and counts

• A file (an image, a PDF or a voice recording): 50 MB. A pool logo: 5 MB.
• What Submerse reads in a file: the first two pages of a PDF. Of images, it describes JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP; a TIFF or BMP uploaded on the website is kept but not described or labelled.
• A title: 500 characters. A note you type without one takes its first line, up to 80 characters. A voice note takes its file’s name, or, for a recording with a default name, the first sentence of its transcript.
• Notes: 50,000 characters on a bookmark or in a note. When a bookmark’s notes are close to that, Submerse can’t add its summary.
• Labels: up to 10 on a bookmark, and up to 10 of a pool’s own labels on a bookmark in that pool. A label’s name is 2 to 50 characters. You can have 1,500 labels, and a pool 1,500 of its own. At 1,500 you can’t make another, and Submerse’s labelling only reuses the labels you have.
• A pool that fills itself by label: up to 20 labels. One label can fill up to 100 pools, and a pool with pools inside it can’t fill itself.
• Changing the pools of a selection: up to 100 bookmarks at a time.
• Following: up to 200 public pools.
• Search on the website shows its 50 best matches. If what you want isn’t there, add a word to bring closer matches to the top.
• Moving between images: the arrows reach the images among a pool’s first 1,900 bookmarks, and in All Bookmarks up to 500 images from your newest 1,900. An image further down still opens on its own.
• Empty Trash on the website deletes up to 4,000 bookmarks at a time; run it again for the rest.
• A custom enrichment prompt (Settings): 2,000 characters.

In the iOS app

• You can pick up to 20 photos at a time.
• Photos and PDFs shared two or more at a time, and any recording, wait on the phone until you next open Submerse. Up to 50 can wait at once; past that the oldest are dropped, so open Submerse before you share more.
• The share sheet has 15 seconds to finish. If it takes longer, it says “This is taking too long.” Two or more files, or a recording, are then not saved; share fewer at a time, or add them from inside the app. A single photo or PDF may still finish uploading, so look for it in Submerse before you share it again.
• Photos you pick, and images shared as pictures, are saved as JPEG unless they are JPEG or PNG, so an animated GIF keeps only its first frame. Share its link instead, or upload it on the website, to keep it moving.
• Search in the app matches the title, notes and address of the bookmarks on your phone. While the phone is online it also shows what Submerse’s search finds: the same search as the website, which looks at labels and at an image’s description and colours, and forgives a typo when nothing matches exactly. Offline it searches only the phone, and says only this iPhone was searched when nothing matches.

Import and export

• Import from Are.na takes channels of up to 50,000 blocks, from an account with up to 5,000 channels. Images and PDFs up to 50 MB are copied in. A larger one, an image in a format Submerse doesn’t take, or any other attachment, such as audio or video, comes in as a link to its Are.na page. Channels inside a channel are skipped, and titles are cut to 500 characters.
• Export to Are.na takes pools of up to 20,000 bookmarks, counting the trash (Unsorted counts your whole library), and sends about 100 a minute while its page stays open. It doesn’t send text notes or voice notes yet. Other bookmarks keep their notes and labels on Are.na, cut to 10,000 characters. A free Are.na account holds 200 blocks, so the export stops there.
• Export to CSV works for a library of up to 100,000 bookmarks, counting the trash. Past that, write to support for a copy.

Command line

• An account can hold 50 CLI keys. At 50, revoke one under “CLI access” in Settings → Profile before you sign in again, on this machine or another.
• Approve a submerse auth login request in your browser within 10 minutes, or run it again.
• A list page holds up to 500 bookmarks, and --all stops after 200 pages. A search returns up to 200 matches. A pool name is up to 100 characters. reorder works on pools of up to 3,000 bookmarks; put a bigger one in order in the app.

When you reach a limit

When a limit refuses something, the app says so, and nothing you have already saved is touched. The one exception is the iPhone’s share queue: shares waiting past 50 are dropped, oldest first, with no message. If a limit gets in the way of real use, write to support@submerse.it and say what you were doing.

Troubleshooting

The Chrome extension stops responding

If the popup says “Could not reach the extension. Close the popup and try again.” every time you open it, or “Save image to Submerse” does nothing, your browser has stopped running the part of the extension that does the saving. Turning the extension off and on again starts it:

1. Open your browser’s extensions page by typing chrome://extensions in the address bar. Other browsers built on Chrome use their own name in place of “chrome”: edge://extensions, brave://extensions, arc://extensions, dia://extensions.
2. Find Submerse and switch it off, then on again.
3. Open the Submerse popup again.

Nothing you’ve saved is affected: your bookmarks are kept in your account, not in the browser. On rare occasions a browser loses track of its extensions’ background work, and other extensions you use can stop working at the same time; switching each one off and on fixes them too. If Submerse still can’t be reached, report a bug or write to support@submerse.it.

Getting help

Report a Bug

Something not working? When you’re signed in, choose “Report a Bug” from the app menu, or “Report a bug” in the command menu, and say what happened. It sends your note with the page you were on, your session state and your account, so we can reproduce the problem.

Email us

For anything else, write to support@submerse.it.

Ideas and requests

Ideas for Submerse are welcome at the same address, and so are requests for a Linux or Windows build of the command-line client.