Help

Getting started

Install

Open the download and move Shotbolt to your Applications folder, then open it. Shotbolt runs in the menu bar, not the Dock. It requires macOS 26 on a Mac with Apple silicon.

Trial and license

Every feature works for 2 days of use, counted while Shotbolt runs. A message warns you when about a day and about two hours are left. After that, capturing and editing stop until you enter a license key; history and copying or saving your existing captures keep working.

Enter your key in the License window. Activation needs the internet once: Shotbolt sends the key and your Mac's name to Polar. It checks again about once a day and keeps working offline for up to 30 days. Moving to another Mac? Choose Deactivate This Mac in the License window first.

Allow Screen Recording

macOS needs your permission before any app can capture the screen. When Shotbolt asks, open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording and turn Shotbolt on. This is the only permission capturing needs. Shortcuts work without Accessibility access.

Two recording options ask for one more permission, and only when you switch them on: the camera bubble asks for Camera, and the keystroke overlay asks for Input Monitoring. Settings links straight to the right place. Without that permission the recording still works, just without that overlay.

First launch

If CleanShot X is installed, Shotbolt imports its shortcuts, export folder and after-capture actions, so your hands keep doing what they already do.

On a Mac without CleanShot X, a short welcome guide opens instead. It shows:

• Whether Screen Recording is allowed, with a button that opens the right System Settings pane.
• A starting set of shortcuts. ⌃⌥⌘ + key works on any keyboard. Hyper key is for people who already turned Caps Lock into a Hyper key (see Shortcuts). You can change every shortcut later.
• A switch to launch Shotbolt at login.

You can reopen the welcome guide from Settings → About.

Shortcuts

Every shortcut is yours to choose. There is no right set: pick keys that are easy for your hands and do not clash with apps you use.

Change a shortcut

1. Click the Shotbolt icon in the menu bar and choose Settings, then Shortcuts.
2. Click the shortcut next to the action you want to change.
3. Press the keys you want, all at once. A shortcut needs at least one of ⌘ ⌃ ⌥ ⇧ plus a letter, number or other key.

Press Esc to stop without changing anything, or Delete to remove the shortcut. If you pick a combination another action already uses, it moves to the new action and Shotbolt tells you which one lost it. If macOS or another app already uses it, a warning explains where to change that. Reset brings back the suggested shortcut.

What the symbols mean

Hyper means all four of these pressed together. Nobody presses four keys at once by hand: people who use it turn Caps Lock into a single Hyper key with the free app Karabiner-Elements. If that is new to you, choose the ⌃⌥⌘ style instead. It works on every keyboard without extra software.

Suggested shortcuts

The welcome guide sets one of these two styles. Use them as they are or as a starting point.

Coming from CleanShot X? Shotbolt uses your imported shortcuts instead.

Capture overlay

Press a capture shortcut and the overlay appears at once while the screen is frozen underneath, so what you select is exactly what you get. A hint bar shows the keys for the current state, the size badge adds pixel dimensions on Retina displays, and a loupe with a pixel grid follows the cursor.

To resize, grab a selection edge anywhere along its length. Hold ⇧ to keep the ratio or ⌥ to resize from the center. In window mode over the desktop, the whole display is highlighted and labelled.

All-In-One

The All-In-One shortcut opens every capture mode in one panel. Each mode button shows its key. Press P to select the previous area, W to switch to window picking or D to turn on the self-timer.

Self-timer

Choose Self-Timer in the menu bar, or the timer button in All-In-One, and pick an area, a window or the full screen. After 3, 5 or 10 seconds (set the default in Settings → Capture) Shotbolt takes a fresh picture, so a menu you opened or a button you hover in the meantime is in the shot. Esc or Cancel stops it, and Capture now skips the wait.

QR codes and barcodes

Capture text also reads QR codes and barcodes. What the code contains is copied, one code per line. If it is a web link, the confirmation also offers Open; anything else, such as Wi-Fi details or a phone number, is only copied. Turn this off in Settings → Capture.

Quick Access and pins

Quick Access cards

New captures appear in the Quick Access stack.

• Hover a card for its actions, or right-click for the full menu.
• Double-click a screenshot to annotate it.
• Drag a card into another app to drop the file there.
• Copy and Save confirm on the card itself with a checkmark. Save names the folder it saved to.
• When a capture clearly needs it, the card suggests one next step: Redact when it finds sensitive data, Explain Error for an error message (with Apple Intelligence), Extract Table, Translate for text in another language, or Compare with an earlier capture of the same window. Click × to hide it, or right-click and choose Don't Suggest This. Turn suggestions off in Settings → Quick Access.
• The newest card always shows a trash button. Deleting a saved capture asks before moving its file to the Trash. Dismissing a card only closes the preview.

Pinned screenshots

Pin a screenshot to keep it floating above your windows. Hover controls let you close, zoom (click for actual size), change opacity and lock it. Unlock locked pins from the menu bar's Unlock Pinned Screenshots.

History

Recent-capture column

Your Capture history shortcut shows a column of recent captures at the left edge of the display with the pointer. The newest capture is at the bottom; scroll up for older ones. Rows show the relative time and Video, GIF or Unsaved badges, and the card width follows Settings → Quick Access → size. When Quick Access is visible on that display, the column docks above its stack. Press the shortcut again or Esc to close it and return to the app you came from.

Full history

Choose Open full history from the column's grid button, its context menu or the menu bar. The full history window is searchable, grouped by day and filterable by type, with batch actions and key hints in its footer. Press ⌘F to search; Return or ↓ selects the first match. Esc first leaves the search field, then closes the window.

Search inside screenshots

Search finds captures by their file name and by the words that appear in them. Type stripe payout and every screenshot showing both words turns up, in any order, with the match highlighted. Name matches come first, then captures found through their text.

Shotbolt reads the text of each new screenshot on your Mac about a second after you capture it, without slowing anything down, and works through older history quietly in the background. The text stays in a small index on your Mac. Turn it off in Settings → Intelligence, which also deletes the index, or choose Rebuild index to read everything again.

Compare two screenshots

Select two screenshots in history and right-click Compare, or press ⌥⌘C. Compare with Previous (on a Quick Access card and in history) compares a screenshot with the one you took before it. With one selected, Compare with… offers your recent screenshots, or lets you drop in a second image or pick a file. The older one is shown as Before; the swap button flips them.

• Side by Side keeps zoom and scrolling in step, Swipe wipes from one to the other with a slider, Onion Skin lays one over the other, and Difference fades Before and marks every changed pixel in magenta.
• Auto-align corrects small shifts, so a screenshot taken one pixel off is not shown as all changed. Tolerance sets how big a color difference must be to count.
• Nearby changes are grouped and counted. Press [ or ] to jump to the previous or next change.
• Export saves the difference image, or both screenshots side by side with the changes boxed and numbered, to history and Quick Access.

How long history keeps captures

In Settings → History, choose forever, 3 months, 1 month (the default), 1 week or 1 day. Older entries disappear from history. A file is deleted only if you never saved it and it is still in Shotbolt's own captures folder. Files in your export folder, in iCloud Drive or anywhere you saved them are never touched.

Selecting and acting

Both the column and the full history work the same way:

Copying one screenshot copies its image; copying several captures puts their file URLs on the clipboard. You can also pin the selection, drag it out as multiple files, or reveal every selected file in Finder. When a deletion includes saved files, you choose between Remove from History and Move to Trash.

Measure and inspect

Press your Measure shortcut, or choose Measure in the menu bar. The screen holds still like it does for a capture, and you measure what is on it. A hint bar shows the keys. Press Esc, right-click or press the shortcut again to stop.

• Point at anything: lines run to the nearest edges, with the width and height between them. Hold ⇧ for the four distances from the pointer. Arrow keys move the pointer one pixel at a time.
• Drag a box roughly around an element and it shrinks to fit it. Hold ⌘ while you let go to keep the box as you drew it.
• Spacing: click a box to select it and Shift-click a second one, then hold ⌥ to see the gaps between them. A click pins the current measurement so it stays.
• If edges are found too easily or not at all, press [ or ] to change how different a color must be to count as an edge.

Colors and contrast

In Inspect, the color under the pointer is shown as HEX, RGB and HSL. Press 1, 2 or 3 to copy one. Click two colors, for example text and its background, to see their contrast ratio with a pass or fail for the WCAG 2.2 AA and AAA levels, for normal and large text. These are the common guidelines for text that most people can read comfortably. The ratio is never rounded up, so a result just below a limit never looks like a pass.

Editor

Double-click a Quick Access screenshot, or open one from history. Every annotation stays separately selectable and editable after you save and reopen it from history, because the original image and the editing state are stored next to the capture.

Each screenshot you open while the editor is showing becomes a tab in the same window. Close a tab with ⌘W; you are asked to save first if it has changes. The + button or ⌘T opens an earlier screenshot from your history in a new tab.

Tools

Tooltips show each tool's key. With Select active and nothing selected, the inspector lists them too.

• Hold ⇧ while using Highlight to draw freehand.
• Select a shape, arrow, line, text or counter and drag its rotation handle. ⇧ snaps rotation to 15° steps.

Inspector

• Independent fill and stroke, each with color and opacity. Custom colors are remembered in a Recent row.
• Click a slider's value to type an exact number, then press Return.
• Stroke width from 1 to 40 pt with Small, Medium and Large presets. Solid, dashed and dotted lines, with dash length, spacing and corners in the Line row's menu.
• Arrows can be tapered, straight, curved or double-headed, with a head size and a bend control.
• Soft shadows for shapes, arrows, lines and pen strokes.
• Text in System, Rounded, Serif or Monospaced, with size, bold, alignment, shadow and a filled or outlined background.
• Counters: filled or outline, number styles 1 2 3, A B C or I II III, a next-number field and Renumber from 1.
• Pixelate / Blur has a Solid option that fully redacts.
• Crop has ratio chips for 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 3:4 and 9:16.
• Background: transparent and solid fills, 30 presets, a custom gradient with three color stops, padding, corner radius, inset, shadow and aspect presets such as 16:9, 1:1 and story 9:16.

Layers

The Layers panel lists annotations front to back, including ones covered by another shape. Select a row to edit it, or reorder with the buttons or these shortcuts.

Redact sensitive data

Press D or click the eye button next to Pixelate in the toolbar. Shotbolt reads the screenshot on your Mac and lists what it found by type, with a count and a checkbox for each. Redact covers them all in one step, and every cover stays a normal annotation you can move or remove.

• It finds email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, links with a password or token in them, IBANs, payment card numbers, Dutch BSN numbers, API keys and tokens, and IP addresses. Personal names are off by default. Switch each type on or off in Settings → Intelligence.
• Only the sensitive part of a line is covered, not the whole line. Numbers are checked before they count, so dates and ordinary numbers are left alone.
• The default cover is a solid block, because pixelated or blurred short text can sometimes be reconstructed. You can choose pixelate or blur instead.

Redact sensitive data before copying (Settings → Intelligence, off by default) checks every new screenshot automatically. The clipboard and the saved file get the redacted version, and a message offers Undo. The original stays in history: open the capture to see it, with the covers as annotations you can remove.

Adjust and filters

Press E or click the sliders button in the toolbar to open Adjust. Changes apply to the screenshot itself, under your annotations, and stay editable after you save and reopen it. Copy, Save, Drag and Pin include them.

• Light: exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows.
• Color: temperature, tint, saturation and vibrance.
• Detail: sharpness, clarity and vignette, plus invert and grayscale.
• Auto sets the light and color sliders for you, so you can fine-tune from there.
• Filters: Vivid, Warm, Cool, Mono, Noir, Fade, Sepia, Chrome, Matte, High Contrast and Soft, previewed on your own screenshot, with an intensity slider. A filter and the sliders work together.

Edit text in a screenshot

Choose Edit Text (I), or Edit Text in Screenshot on a Quick Access card, to change the words in a screenshot: fix a typo, try a new label, or hide a name. Shotbolt reads the text on your Mac and outlines each line it found. Click a line and type its replacement; hold ⌥ to pick a single word. Press ↩ or click elsewhere to finish, or Esc to cancel. Clear the text to erase it. Select edited text to move it, turn it with its knob (⇧ for 15° steps) or scale it from a corner; the patch over the original words stays in place. Hold ⌥ to resize the patch itself, and use Back in Place to return the text.

• The new text gets the size, color, weight and position of the original, and long text shrinks or wraps to fit. You can change all of it in the inspector.
• Each changed line is its own layer, Edited Text in Layers. Double-click it to retype it, or delete it to bring the original back.
• Translate puts the whole screenshot, or the lines you Shift-click, into the language you choose, with Apple's translation built into macOS. The first time you use a language pair, macOS asks to download it once; after that it works offline. Nothing is sent to a translation service.
• Hold \ or Show Original to see the screenshot as you captured it. Copy Text copies all changed and translated text.

Colors

Every color control opens Shotbolt's own color picker: drag in the square for shade, use the slider for hue, or type a hex code such as #FF7A1A. The eyedropper button next to each color control picks any color on screen. Esc cancels a pick.

Rotate, flip and resize

Use the Image menu in the toolbar: rotate left or right, flip horizontally or vertically, or Resize Image… in pixels or percent. Annotations move with the image. Text and counters turn with it but are never mirrored or turned upside down.

Lift Subject

Choose Image → Lift Subject… (⌥⌘L), or right-click a Quick Access card, to cut the subject out of a screenshot: a person, an object or a window. If there are several, click the one you want, or Select All. Copy puts a transparent PNG on the clipboard, Save adds it to history, and in the editor Use as Canvas makes the cutout the whole picture.

App windows on a plain background are cut out with their rounded corners and soft shadow. A window on a busy wallpaper, or a white page on white, cannot be lifted; you will see a short message instead. It all runs on your Mac, only when you ask.

Combining screenshots

Drag an image onto the canvas from Finder, another app, a Quick Access card or history, paste one with ⌘V, or choose Add Image…. It becomes a layer you can move, resize, rotate and reorder. A small image lands where you drop it; a larger one is placed beside the screenshot and the canvas grows to hold both.

Background presets and pictures

In Background, Save current stores the whole setup as a named preset you can apply in one click. Under Pictures, add your own image as a background, filling the canvas or fitted on its average color.

Action bar

The labelled action bar offers Pin, Drag, Copy, Save (its menu has Save As) and Done. Closing an edited screenshot asks whether to save, discard or cancel.

Scrolling, recording and video

Scrolling capture

Press your Scrolling capture shortcut, select the part to capture and scroll. A small panel shows hints, the height so far and how close you are to the maximum. Return finishes and Esc cancels. Fixed headers, footers and docks appear once in the result instead of repeating.

Screen recording

Press your Record screen shortcut to start and again to stop, or choose Stop Recording in the menu bar. The countdown can be canceled with Esc or its button. While recording, a small panel shows the time so far and whether your microphone, your Mac’s sound and the pointer are being recorded. A short saving indicator appears after you stop.

When you record a GIF, conversion shows its progress and the estimated time left, with a Save as video instead option.

Clicks, keystrokes and camera

Turn these on in Settings → Recording. Each one is optional.

• Clicks: a ring wherever you click, in your color and size, with a ripple, pulse or fade. Right-clicks show a double ring.
• Keystrokes: the keys you press, in a small label at the bottom or in a corner. By default only shortcuts such as ⇧⌘4 are shown and normal typing is hidden. Typed text is never stored, and password fields are never shown.
• Camera: a round or rounded-square bubble in three sizes. Drag it anywhere and it settles into the nearest corner. Double-click it to fill the recording with the camera. The camera is on only while you record.

Video editor

Open a recording from Quick Access or history to edit it. Everything happens on your Mac.

• Trim and cut: drag the ends of the clip to trim, and add cuts to remove parts in the middle. Removed parts stay visible, striped, so you can bring them back.
• Smart zoom: Auto zoom adds zooms around your clicks and where the pointer pauses. Move, resize or delete any zoom and set its level from 1.2× to 4×. Each zoom has a curve (Smooth, Snappy, Spring or Linear), its own zoom-in and zoom-out length, and a target: Follow Pointer or a Fixed Area you drag on the preview. Recordings without pointer data can zoom on a fixed area.
• Text clips (T): a title, lower third or callout on its own lane, with font, size, color and a background pill. Drag it into place on the preview and choose how it enters and leaves: fade, slide or pop.
• Speed-ups (S): play a stretch at 1.5×, 2×, 4× or 8×. The audio is muted there, captions skip it, and the export stays in sync.
• Pointer: with Record cursor as an editable layer turned on in Settings → Recording, you can change the pointer's size, smooth its movement, hide it when it rests and add a click effect.
• Motion blur for zooms and pointer movement, and a frame with background, padding, rounded corners and shadow.
• Export as original, 16:9, 1:1, 9:16 or 4:5, to MP4 (H.264 or HEVC) or GIF, at up to 4K and 60 frames per second.

Captions

Open the Captions tab and click Generate Captions. The speech in your recording is turned into text on your Mac with Apple's on-device speech recognition. The audio is never uploaded.

• If the recording has both your microphone and your Mac's sound, choose one or both. Pick a language, or leave it on Automatic to use your Mac's preferred language.
• The first time you use a language, macOS downloads its speech model. You can follow the progress and cancel.
• Correct any line in the transcript, and click a timestamp to jump to that moment.
• Style the captions: font, size, top or bottom, background, one or two lines, and a highlight on the word being spoken. What you see in the preview is what you export.
• Captions are burned into MP4 and GIF exports, and follow your trims and cuts. Subtitles saves an SRT or WebVTT file, and Copy Text copies the transcript.
• To caption every recording without asking, turn on Transcribe recordings automatically in Settings → Intelligence. It is off by default.

Step guides

A step guide turns your clicks into a how-to. Choose Record Step Guide… in the menu bar, click Steps in All-In-One, or give it a shortcut in Settings → Shortcuts. A small panel shows the step number, with buttons to add a note, pause, cancel and Finish.

• Every click captures one step: a screenshot of the window you clicked in, where you clicked, and the app. Menus and the Dock capture the whole display. To always capture the whole display, change it in Settings → Capture. Clicks on Shotbolt's own panel are skipped and the panel never appears in the screenshots.
• No extra permission is needed. Screen Recording, which every capture uses, is enough.
• Already recorded a video? Choose Make Step Guide on it in history, or Step Guide in the video editor. Every click in the parts you kept becomes a step, with a frame from just before the click, and what you said before a click becomes its description. If a recording has no click data, the button says so.
• Finish opens the guide. Each step is titled after what you clicked, such as “Click ‘Save’ in Pages”. Change any title or description, drag steps into a new order, and edit the guide's title and introduction.
• Numbers adds a step number to each screenshot and Spotlight dims everything around the click. Both can be turned off for all steps.
• For one step: double-click its picture to mark it up in the editor, or use Re-crop…, Merge with Next Step, Reset Edits and Delete Step. ⌘Z undoes changes to the order and steps.
• Redact sensitive data covers sensitive data in every step at once, like Redact in the editor. You can also have it done for every new guide in Settings. The original screenshots are kept inside the guide, so share an export rather than the guide itself.

Export

• Markdown folder: a text file with the steps and a folder of pictures.
• HTML file: one file with the pictures inside, in light and dark mode. It opens in any browser and loads nothing from the internet.
• PDF: one step per page, A4 or US Letter.
• Copy as Rich Text: paste into Notion, Google Docs, Pages, TextEdit or Mail. How pictures come through depends on the app you paste into.

Guides are listed in history with a Guide badge and never expire. Copy there puts the guide on the clipboard as rich text.

Intelligence

Everything Shotbolt reads from your captures, to search, name, redact, caption or translate them, runs on your Mac with Apple's on-device models. Nothing is uploaded. Settings → Intelligence puts it all in one place:

• Search: search inside screenshots, with Rebuild index.
• Smart names: name files by what they show.
• Redact: redact before copying, the default cover style, and which kinds of data to look for.
• Captions: transcribe recordings automatically.
• Translation: the languages installed on your Mac.

Models on this Mac shows whether Apple Intelligence, text recognition, speech recognition and translation are ready, and if one is not, why: for example Apple Intelligence switched off, still downloading or not available on this Mac.

Local intelligence data shows how much Shotbolt has stored from reading your captures. Clear… asks first, then deletes only that data. Your captures and files stay, and so do caption transcripts you corrected.

Intelligence menu

Right-click a Quick Access card or a capture in history and choose Intelligence, or use the Intelligence menu in the menu bar while the editor is open. Copy Text copies the words in the screenshot in reading order, without capturing again.

AI-safe Copy

AI-safe Copy puts a screenshot on the clipboard that is ready to paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Click the wand button on a Quick Access card, press ⇧⌘C in the editor, right-click a capture in Quick Access or history, or choose AI-safe Copy of Last Capture in the menu bar.

• Sensitive data is covered with solid blocks, using the kinds you chose for Redact. If the text cannot be read, nothing is copied rather than the original.
• Large screenshots are scaled down, and hidden details such as the time and resolution are removed. Choose the size in Settings → Intelligence → AI-safe Copy.
• A message says how many items were covered. Undo copies the original instead.
• AI-safe Text Copy (hold ⌥, or press ⌥⇧⌘C) copies the text as Markdown, with headings, lists and code blocks. Sensitive data is replaced by labels such as [REDACTED EMAIL].

Paste protection

Redact when pasting into AI apps (Settings → Intelligence, off by default) redacts a screenshot from Shotbolt when you paste it into an app on your list, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini or Raycast. In other apps it pastes unchanged. Good to know:

• Browsers cannot be told apart per website, so for AI chats in a browser, use AI-safe Copy.
• It covers screenshots on the clipboard, not files you copy or drag.
• A clipboard manager that already saved the original keeps it.
• To redact everything you copy, in every app, turn on Redact sensitive data before copying instead.

AI actions

The Intelligence menu also has these actions. Each one shows its answer in a small panel as it is written, with Copy and Retry. Closing the panel stops it. They use Apple's on-device model, which loads only when you start an action. If an action cannot run, for example because Apple Intelligence is off or still downloading, the menu says why.

• Extract Table… turns a table in a screenshot into rows and columns. Copy TSV pastes neatly into Numbers, Excel and Google Sheets; Copy CSV and Save CSV… give you a CSV file. It needs no AI model, so it works on every Mac. It reads one table per screenshot, the largest.
• Explain Error explains an error message, terminal output or stack trace: what happened, the likely cause and fixes to try. Treat the fixes as suggestions: the on-device model is small and can be wrong. Keys, tokens, card and bank numbers and email addresses are replaced before the model reads the text, and the panel says how many.
• Summarize gives three or five bullet points. Very long text is read in parts, and the panel tells you if anything was left out.
• Alt Text writes one or two sentences describing the screenshot for screen reader users.

Workflows

A workflow is a list of steps Shotbolt runs on a screenshot, for example: redact, add a background, copy, save to a folder, open in the editor. Create one in Settings → Workflows: click + and start blank or from a template (Share safely, Polished screenshot or Bug report).

Steps run from top to bottom, so order matters: redact before you resize, so small text is still found, and copy after the background if you want the framed version. If redaction cannot finish, the workflow stops, so nothing unredacted is copied or saved.

Run a workflow

• Give it a shortcut in Settings → Workflows. Pressing it captures an area, a window or the full screen (you choose per workflow) and runs the steps. Only the result is kept, not the raw capture.
• Run Workflow in the menu bar, or right-click screenshots in history and choose Run Workflow. Screenshots in history are never overwritten; a changed result becomes a new entry.
• From a script: open "shotbolt://run-workflow?name=Bug%20report". Add &source=latest to run it on your newest screenshot instead of capturing.

If a step fails, the run stops and a message says which step and why.

Settings and menu bar

Settings has General, Capture, Quick Access, Recording, Intelligence, Shortcuts, Workflows, History and About panes.

• Shortcuts: reset any shortcut to its default. Conflicts with other apps and with the macOS screenshot or Spotlight shortcuts are flagged.
• Screenshot flash: a brief flash over the captured area. It is never part of the saved pixels and never delays saving or copying.
• Motion: all animation follows the macOS Reduce Motion setting.
• Name files by content (Settings → Intelligence, off by default): screenshots are named after what they show, for example Stripe – Payout settings, followed by the date. Apple's on-device model writes the name; without it, the window title and app name are used. Naming never delays the clipboard, and a file you already moved or edited is never renamed.
• iCloud Drive: Shotbolt has no cloud service of its own. In Settings → General, Save to iCloud Drive saves captures to a Shotbolt folder in iCloud Drive, so they appear on your other devices.

The menu bar menu includes:

• Allow Screen Recording… while the permission is missing.
• Stop Recording while a recording runs.
• Capture History, which opens and closes the recent-capture column.
• Open Full History…
• Unlock Pinned Screenshots

Automation

Trigger Shotbolt from Raycast, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro or a shell script through its URL scheme. Commands are case-insensitive and only the listed ones are accepted.

shotbolt://capture-area
shotbolt://capture-window
shotbolt://capture-fullscreen
shotbolt://capture-area-timer
shotbolt://capture-window-timer
shotbolt://capture-fullscreen-timer
shotbolt://capture-previous-area
shotbolt://all-in-one
shotbolt://capture-text
shotbolt://scrolling-capture
shotbolt://record-screen
shotbolt://record-gif
shotbolt://record-steps
shotbolt://toggle-history
shotbolt://open-history
shotbolt://open-settings
shotbolt://annotate-clipboard
shotbolt://pin-clipboard
shotbolt://restore
shotbolt://measure
shotbolt://copy-for-ai
shotbolt://copy-text-for-ai

From a shell, use open shotbolt://capture-area. toggle-history toggles the docked column, open-history opens the full grid, and restore brings back the most recently dismissed Quick Access card. The timer commands use your default delay; add ?seconds=3, 5 or 10 to choose another.

Fastest trigger, for scripts

Posting a Darwin notification skips URL handling entirely: notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.<command>. These commands are supported:

notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-area
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-window
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-fullscreen
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-area-timer
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-window-timer
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-fullscreen-timer
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-previous-area
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.all-in-one
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.capture-text
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.scrolling-capture
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.record-screen
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.record-gif
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.record-steps
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.toggle-history
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.measure
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.copy-for-ai
notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.copy-text-for-ai

Each workflow also has its own name: notifyutil -p nl.breukr.shotbolt.run-workflow.<name>, with the name in lower case and dashes instead of spaces, such as bug-report. Settings shows it. Use the URL scheme for the other commands.

Troubleshooting

Captures fail or the permission is missing

While Screen Recording is not allowed, the menu bar shows Allow Screen Recording…. Choose it, turn Shotbolt on under Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, then try again. If macOS asks you to quit and reopen the app, do so.

A shortcut does nothing

Open Settings → Shortcuts. A warning appears next to any shortcut that macOS or another app already uses; pick a different one there. If your shortcuts start with Hyper but Caps Lock is not set up as a Hyper key, they cannot work: choose your own keys instead (see Change a shortcut).

The export folder is unavailable

If the export folder cannot be reached, for example an unplugged drive, captures stay in Shotbolt history and a toast says so. Reconnect the drive or choose another folder in Settings, then save the captures from history.

The history shortcut opens CleanShot X instead

Shotbolt handles its own shortcuts, so no Karabiner-Elements rule is needed. If you once added a rule there that sends a key combination to CleanShot X history, delete it under Complex Modifications in Karabiner-Elements so the keys reach Shotbolt.

History looks incomplete

If the history index contains unreadable entries, Shotbolt keeps the readable ones and saves a copy of the original index next to history.json.

Contact

Questions, bugs or ideas: email support@shotbolt.app. Lost your license key? Recover it here.