You published a review and sent the link. Now the questions start: can the client open it without an account? Can they reply on a specific item, or do they have to email you? Who gets to say something is fixed? Here are the answers, phrased the way people actually ask them.
Can anyone open my review link, or do they need to sign in?
Anyone with the link can read it. No account, no sign-in, no waiting for an invite. When you publish, the review gets a short public URL of the form /r/<slug>, and that URL works for whoever you send it to. Paste it into Slack, an email, or a ticket, and the receiver clicks straight through to the screenshots, comments, and pins.
That is the whole point of a link people can open cold. If you want the wider picture of how capture-and-share works, the Cobalt Capture home page lays out the full flow from screen capture to shareable output.
Does the person I send it to need to install anything?
No. The review is a web page. It opens in any browser, on any device with the link. There is nothing to download and no extension to approve, which matters if your reviewer works somewhere IT blocks browser extensions. A client on their phone, a developer on a locked-down laptop, an agent reading the markdown version: all of them open the same review from the same URL.
Can readers comment on a specific item, or only view?
They can comment. Anyone with the link can post a comment on any individual item in the review. So if item 3 is a screenshot of a broken checkout button and your developer disagrees about the cause, they reply right on item 3 instead of starting a separate email thread. The comment lives next to the screenshot and the pin it refers to, so nobody has to reconstruct which screen you meant.
This is what keeps a review from turning into a scattered back-and-forth. Every reply is attached to the thing it is about. If you are collecting sign-off from a client, that context is what makes it work as client feedback without a project tool.
Who can mark a comment resolved?
The review owner. You created the review, so you are the one who marks each comment resolved as issues get handled. Readers can post comments; only you close them out. That gives you a simple running state without a kanban board or workflow columns. There is more on how that works in resolving review comments without a bug tracker.
Cobalt Capture is not a bug tracker with assignees and statuses. Resolve is a single owner-side toggle per comment, nothing more. That is deliberate. You get to see what is left without administering a system.
If I did not sign in when I published, is the review still mine?
Yes, for a while. You can publish a review with no account at all. An anonymous review is kept for 30 days. If you sign in later, that review gets claimed permanently to your account, so you do not lose it. Sign-in is free and optional, by Google or an emailed magic link. The full detail is in claiming an anonymous review after you sign in.
The practical takeaway: you can capture and share something in the next five minutes without creating anything. Claim it afterward if you decide to keep it.
Can the person reading it see my analytics?
No. Visit counts and visitor geography live on an owner-facing analytics page. Readers see the review; you see who opened it and from where. If you send a review to five stakeholders and want to know whether the client actually looked, that page tells you. Here is how to read the visit counts on a published review.
Can I give a client and a developer different views of the same review?
They read the same review, but the format each one wants differs. A client wants a readable page or a polished PDF or Word export. A developer or an AI coding agent wants the plain markdown at /r/<slug>/markdown. Same review, same content, different output. You can hand one link to a client and the markdown to a developer from the same publish. There is a walkthrough of exactly that split in one review, two links.
What can readers not do?
Readers cannot edit your screenshots, add new captured items, or change your comments. They add their own comments on existing items, and that is the extent of it. They also cannot mark anything resolved. Editing the review, adding items, and closing comments stay with you as the owner. If a reader spots a screen you missed, they say so in a comment and you capture it.
There is no live multi-reviewer session either. People open the link on their own time and comment async, which is usually what you want across time zones. See how that plays out for a client you are never online with at the same time.
What is the fastest way to test all of this myself?
Capture one screen, add a comment, publish, and open the resulting link in a private window to see exactly what a reader sees. Then post a comment as that reader and go back to mark it resolved as the owner. Two minutes tells you more than any explanation. Start a new review and try it on whatever you are looking at right now.