First release, in preparation
Capture
- Capture an area, a window, the full display or the previous area.
- Capture overlay with a loupe and pixel grid, a live size badge with pixel dimensions on Retina displays, and a hint bar that shows the keys for the current state.
- Resize a selection from any edge, keep its ratio with Shift or resize from the center with Option. Arrow keys nudge the selection.
- All-In-One panel with every capture mode and its key.
- Scrolling capture with a live height readout. Fixed headers, footers and docks appear once in the result.
- Text capture: select a region and the recognized text is copied. Recognition runs on your Mac.
- Text capture also reads QR codes and barcodes. Web links get an Open button; other codes are only copied.
- Self-timer of 3, 5 or 10 seconds for area, window and full-screen captures. The picture is taken after the countdown, so open menus and hover states show up.
- Optional screenshot flash over the captured area, never part of the saved image.
Quick Access and history
- Quick Access stack for new captures: copy, save, annotate, pin, drag into another app or open the full menu.
- Pinned screenshots with zoom, opacity and lock, all with keyboard shortcuts.
- A column of recent captures at the screen edge, opened and closed with one shortcut.
- Full history window, grouped by day and filterable by type.
- Search screenshots by the text inside them. Text is read on your Mac shortly after capture, matches are highlighted, and turning it off deletes the local index.
- Compare two screenshots (⌥⌘C): side by side, swipe, onion skin or a difference view that marks every changed pixel. Small shifts are aligned automatically, changes are counted and you can jump between them, and the result can be exported to history.
- Compare with Previous: one click compares a screenshot with the one before it, from Quick Access or history. Compare with… lists your recent screenshots.
- Quick Access suggests one next step when a capture clearly needs it: Redact, Explain Error, Extract Table, Translate or Compare. Hide a suggestion, mute a kind, or turn suggestions off in Settings.
- Optional smart file names from Apple's on-device model, such as “Stripe – Payout settings”. Falls back to the window title and app name, and never delays the clipboard.
- Select several captures at once to copy, save, pin, delete or drag them out together, with arrow-key navigation and Space to preview.
- Deleting saved files asks first and offers Remove from History or Move to Trash.
- Choose how long history keeps captures: forever, 3 months, 1 month, 1 week or 1 day. Only captures you never saved are removed; your own files are never touched.
- One click to save captures to iCloud Drive, so they appear on your other devices without a Shotbolt cloud.
Intelligence
- Settings → Intelligence brings search, smart names, redaction, captions and translation together. Everything runs on this Mac and nothing is uploaded.
- Models on this Mac shows whether Apple Intelligence, text recognition, speech recognition and translation are ready, with the reason when one is not.
- Local intelligence data shows how much is stored from reading your captures, with Clear… to delete it. Captures and their files are never touched.
- An Intelligence menu on captures in Quick Access, history and the editor, starting with Copy Text.
- AI-safe Copy: one click puts a screenshot on the clipboard for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, with secrets and personal data covered, sized for AI tools and stripped of metadata. If the text cannot be read, nothing is copied. Undo copies the original.
- AI-safe Text Copy: the screenshot's text as Markdown, with sensitive data replaced by labels.
- Optional paste protection: screenshots pasted into AI apps on an editable list are redacted automatically, other apps get the original.
- Extract Table: turn a screenshot of a table into TSV or CSV for Numbers, Excel and Google Sheets, or save a CSV file. Works without Apple Intelligence.
- Explain Error, Summarize (3 or 5 bullets) and Alt Text, on Apple's on-device model. Answers stream into a small panel with Copy and Retry. Secrets are hidden before the model reads the text.
Measure and inspect
- Measure anything on screen: distances to the nearest edges, element sizes, boxes that snap to content, gaps between elements and guides, in points or pixels.
- Copy a measurement as text, such as “128 × 44 pt”, or save the screen with every measurement drawn in.
- Inspect colors as HEX, RGB and HSL, and check the contrast of two colors against WCAG 2.2 AA and AAA, for normal and large text. Ratios are never rounded up onto a limit.
Editor
- Annotation tools for shapes, arrows, lines, pen, text, counters, highlight, spotlight, pixelate and blur, crop and background, each with a single-key shortcut.
- Every annotation stays editable after saving and reopening from history.
- Tabs: screenshots you open join one editor window as tabs. ⌘T opens an earlier screenshot from history in a new tab.
- Layers panel that lists annotations front to back, including ones hidden under other shapes.
- Independent fill and stroke, remembered custom colors, solid, dashed and dotted lines, soft shadows and exact values for every slider.
- Counters in 1 2 3, A B C or I II III, with renumbering when there are gaps.
- Backgrounds with 30 presets, a custom three-stop gradient, padding, corner radius, shadow and aspect presets.
- Solid redaction option that fully hides what is underneath.
- Auto-redact: finds email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, IBANs, card numbers, Dutch BSN, API keys and tokens, IP addresses and links with secrets on your Mac, and covers them in one click (D). Personal names are optional.
- Optional redact before copying: the clipboard and saved file are redacted automatically, and the original stays in history.
- A built-in color picker with a saturation square, hue slider, hex field and eyedropper, plus an eyedropper on every color control.
- Rotate, flip and resize a screenshot. Annotations move with it, and text never ends up mirrored or upside down.
- Combine screenshots: drop or paste images onto the canvas as layers, and the canvas grows to fit.
- Lift Subject (⌥⌘L): cut a person, object or window out of a screenshot as a transparent PNG, on your Mac. Windows keep their rounded corners and shadow. Copy, save, or use the cutout as the canvas.
- Save background setups as presets, and use your own picture as a background.
- Adjust pane: exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, temperature, tint, saturation, vibrance, sharpness, clarity and vignette, plus one-click Auto Enhance. Hold the backslash key (\) to compare with the original.
- Edit Text (I): click any text in a screenshot and retype it. Size, weight, color and position are matched and the background is filled in. Clearing the text erases it.
- Edited text can be moved, turned and resized while the patch over the original words stays in place. Back in Place returns it.
- Translate the whole screenshot or selected lines on your Mac with Apple's Translation, with the language detected automatically. Every translated line stays editable.
- Filters such as Vivid, Warm, Cool, Mono, Noir, Sepia and Matte, previewed on your own screenshot, with an intensity slider. Adjustments stay editable and are included when you copy, save, drag or pin.
Recording
- Screen recording with your microphone, your Mac's sound and the pointer, shown in a small panel while recording.
- Cancelable countdown and a single Stop Recording item in the menu bar.
- GIF conversion with progress, an estimate of the time left and a Save as video instead option.
- Click highlights in your own color, size and animation, with a different look for right-clicks.
- Keystroke overlay that shows shortcuts only by default and never stores typed text. It asks for Input Monitoring only when you turn it on.
- Camera bubble you can drag to any corner or switch to full screen. The camera turns off as soon as the recording stops.
Video editor
- Trim and cut recordings on a timeline with a live preview.
- Smart zoom: zooms are added around clicks and where the pointer pauses, and every zoom stays editable.
- Zoom curves (Smooth, Snappy, Spring, Linear), separate zoom-in and zoom-out lengths, and a target: follow the pointer or a fixed area.
- Text clips: title, lower third and callout on their own lane, with fade, slide or pop in and out.
- Speed-ups from 1.5× to 8× for slow stretches, with audio and captions kept in sync.
- Optional editable cursor layer for smoothing, hiding the pointer when idle and click effects.
- Motion blur, backgrounds, padding, rounded corners and shadow.
- Export as original, 16:9, 1:1, 9:16 or 4:5, as H.264, HEVC or GIF, up to 4K. Everything runs on your Mac.
- Captions: transcribe a recording on your Mac with Apple's on-device speech recognition, with no upload. Edit the transcript, click a line to jump there, and style the captions with font, size, top or bottom, background, one or two lines and a highlight on the spoken word.
- Captions are burned into MP4 and GIF exports, and trims and cuts carry over. Save subtitles as SRT or WebVTT, or copy the transcript.
- Optional automatic transcription after each recording, off by default.
Step guides
- Record Step Guide turns every click into a step: a screenshot of the window, the click point and the app. Start it from the menu bar or the Steps button in All-In-One. No Accessibility permission needed.
- Each step gets a title from what you clicked, such as “Click ‘Save’ in Pages”, read on your Mac, plus a numbered badge and a spotlight on the click.
- Edit titles and notes, reorder, merge, re-crop and annotate any step, and redact sensitive data in all steps at once.
- Export as a Markdown folder, a single HTML file in light and dark, a PDF in A4 or US Letter, or rich text for Notion, Google Docs and Pages.
- Guides appear in history with a Guide badge and a Guides filter, and never expire.
- Make Step Guide turns a screen recording into a guide: every click in the kept parts becomes a step, described by what you said before it. Start it from history or the video editor.
Automation
- Saved workflows: chain redact, filter, background, resize, format, rename, copy, save to folder, pin, editor and Quick Access steps, starting blank or from a template. Run one from its own shortcut, the menu bar, history, a URL or notifyutil. Redaction fails closed, so nothing unredacted is copied or saved.
- URL scheme commands for capturing, recording, step guides, Measure, workflows, AI-safe Copy, history, settings and the clipboard.
- An even faster trigger for scripts, through macOS system notifications.
Trial and license
- Every feature for 2 days of use, with reminders when about a day and about two hours are left. After the trial, history and copying or saving existing captures keep working.
- License keys activate online once and are checked about once a day, with up to 30 days offline. Only the key and the Mac's name are sent.
- Deactivate This Mac in the License window frees the key for another Mac.
Settings
- First launch imports CleanShot X shortcuts, export folder and after-capture actions.
- Welcome guide for new installs: Screen Recording status, a suggested set of shortcuts for any keyboard or for a Hyper key, and launch at login.
- Choose your own shortcut for every action: click it in Settings and press the keys. Clashes with macOS or other apps are flagged, and Reset restores the suggestion.
- Shortcuts work without Accessibility access.
- All animation follows the macOS Reduce Motion setting.