diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index f9339896..46222491 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -107,3 +107,11 @@ kernel*.bin
 times.txt
 /unlvtests/results*
 
+# snap packaging specific rules
+/parts/
+/stage/
+/prime/
+/snap/.snapcraft/
+
+/*.snap
+/*_source.tar.bz2
diff --git a/snap/snapcraft.yaml b/snap/snapcraft.yaml
index 8be7d82f..64585c6b 100644
--- a/snap/snapcraft.yaml
+++ b/snap/snapcraft.yaml
@@ -1,18 +1,28 @@
 name: tesseract
-version: master
+version: git
 summary: open source optical character recognition engine
 description: |
   Tesseract has unicode (UTF-8) support, and can recognize more than 100
   languages "out of the box". It can be trained to recognize other languages.
   Tesseract supports various output formats: plain-text, hocr(html), pdf.
 
-grade: devel # must be 'stable' to release into candidate/stable channels
+  If you want to access the files under /media/* or /run/media/* you'll have
+  to connect the snap to the `core` snap's `removable-media` interface:
+
+      $ sudo snap connect tesseract:removable-media
+
+grade: stable # must be 'stable' to release into candidate/stable channels
 confinement: strict
 
 apps:
   tesseract:
-    command: env TESSDATA_PREFIX=$SNAP_USER_COMMON tesseract
-    plugs: [home]
+    command: >
+      env
+      TESSDATA_PREFIX=$SNAP_USER_COMMON
+      tesseract
+    plugs:
+      - home
+      - removable-media
 
 parts:
   tesseract:
@@ -27,7 +37,14 @@ parts:
       - libicu-dev
       - libpango1.0-dev
       - libcairo2-dev
+    stage-packages:
+      - libgomp1
     after: [leptonica]
   leptonica:
     source: https://github.com/DanBloomberg/leptonica/archive/1.74.2.tar.gz
     plugin: autotools
+    stage-packages:
+      - libjbig0
+      - libjpeg-turbo8
+      - libopenjp2-7
+      - libtiff5