Saved Color Palettes: Keep a Scan for Later

## Why it matters

History is a stream; a saved palette is a decision. When a scan of a website gives you exactly the set of colours you want for a project, naming and saving it turns a fleeting result into something you can come back to weeks later, hand to a teammate, or drop straight into your design tokens. Unlike history (which caps at 100 items and drops the oldest), a saved palette persists until you delete it.

Every saved palette stays in chrome.storage.local, so it never leaves your machine. You do not need an account, do not get tracked, and get no cloud sync. The trade-off is device-specific storage, which is fine when the whole point is keeping colours out of the internet.

## How it works

After running a palette scan in the Palette tab, name it and click "Save." The palette appears in the History tab under "Saved palettes," sorted by most recent. Click any saved palette to reload it into the Picker and the Palette tab. From there you can edit, compare, or export it.

Saving does not tie to a URL. You can save a palette extracted from Site A, use it on Site B, and keep refining it. The name you give it matters: a good name beats "Palette 7" three weeks later when you are trying to remember which scan had all the greys you liked.

Each saved palette also stores metadata: when you saved it, how many colours it contains. This makes it easy to scan your collection at a glance.

## What does not matter

Saved palettes are not synced across devices. If you save a palette on your laptop and then switch to your desktop machine, the desktop does not have it. This is by design: Chrome's storage.sync would send everything to Google's servers, which would mean giving up the privacy guarantee. If you need to share a palette across machines, export it as JSON, push it somewhere (GitHub, Slack, email), and import it on the other device. The extension reads JSON exports just as happily as it reads saved palettes.

Also, saved palettes are not backed up if you wipe your browser data or uninstall the extension. Back up the ones that matter by exporting to JSON.

## Code example

A saved palette exported as JSON looks like this:

{
  "name": "Twilight Sky",
  "colors": [
    {
      "hex": "#1a1a2e",
      "rgb": "rgb(26 26 46)",
      "hsl": "hsl(240 28% 14%)",
      "oklch": "oklch(0.10 0.02 264)"
    },
    {
      "hex": "#16213e",
      "rgb": "rgb(22 33 62)",
      "hsl": "hsl(216 48% 16%)",
      "oklch": "oklch(0.14 0.05 258)"
    },
    {
      "hex": "#0f3460",
      "rgb": "rgb(15 52 96)",
      "hsl": "hsl(207 73% 22%)",
      "oklch": "oklch(0.20 0.10 249)"
    }
  ],
  "savedAt": "2026-07-19T14:23:00Z"
}
Copy

You can paste this into a design-tokens file, feed it to Style Dictionary, or share it with teammates.

## How Scalpel Color shows it

The History tab "Saved palettes" section lists every palette you have saved. Click one to reload it. Hover over a saved palette to see the save date and colour count. Right-click to rename or delete it. The Palette tab's export menu offers JSON, CSS variables, and Tailwind config formats; any of these can be imported back into the extension as a new palette.

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## Related glossary

See color-history for the running log of all colours you have picked, color-palette-extraction for how to scan a website for its dominant colours, color-design-tokens for how to turn a palette into a cross-platform token set, and css-custom-properties for how to export a palette as reusable CSS variables.