Mac screenshots: markup, numbered steps and redaction

Updated 2026-09-02 · v0.2.10

macOS ⌘⇧4 captures fast, but then you still open Preview to draw an arrow, another app to hide a card number, and lay three images out by hand when you need them in one picture. This page covers capturing, annotating, redacting and stitching without leaving the keyboard.

Capturing

Every mode has its own key and fires immediately:

While the selection overlay is open: drag to mark a region, or hover a window until its border lights up and click. Press Space to switch mode mid-selection, Esc to cancel. Multi-monitor setups work normally, and captures keep full Retina resolution.

Capturing an open menu

Menus and tooltips disappear the instant you press a shortcut or click elsewhere — which is why ⌘⇧4 struggles with them. Use the self-timer: set 3, 5 or 10 seconds, trigger the capture, then open the menu and hold it there until the shot is taken.

After the capture: the floating card

The new shot appears as a small card in the corner. From there you can copy it to the clipboard, save it, open markup, add it to the stitch tray, open it in another app — or drag the card straight into Finder, Slack or an email window.

Taking many shots in a row? Turn on the option that sends every shot to the tray and turn off auto-opening the tray: capture a whole sequence uninterrupted and sort it out afterwards.

Annotating

The markup tools are arrows, boxes, ellipses, pen, highlighter, text, and auto-incrementing number badges — each one you place is 1, 2, 3… so writing a step-by-step never involves counting by hand. Anything you place can be selected again to move or delete; undo and redo have shortcuts.

Redacting sensitive information

The blur tool exists for emails, tokens, card numbers, customer names, real data in a table — the things that end up in a bug screenshot and then go straight into a public issue.

1. Open the shot in markup from the floating card or from the screenshot library inside the app.
2. Pick the blur tool and cover the region. Go slightly wider than the text — a legible edge is enough to guess the rest.
3. Export the image and share the exported file. The original in the tray and in the library is still unredacted, so do not send that one.

When a part of the image should be gone entirely rather than blurred, use crop — cropped pixels are not in the exported file at all.

Stitching several shots into one image

The stitch tray collects multiple shots and exports them as a single image — useful for before-and-after, or three steps of a flow, without sending three separate files.

• Layouts: vertical, horizontal, grid, bento, or freeform to place things yourself.
• Backdrops: Night, Sunset, Graphite, or transparent when it goes on top of something else.
• Annotate on the stitched result, so number badges run continuously across the shots.
• The tray survives quitting the app, and you can drag or paste in images from outside — including ones this app did not capture.

Formats and where files land

Choose PNG, JPEG or HEIC in Settings. PNG for interface shots with text (crisp, no noise around glyphs), JPEG when you need a small file of a photographic image, HEIC for small files at high quality inside the Apple ecosystem. Screenshots default to ~/Pictures/, configurable in Settings.

Next

Screen recording and capture permissions · Export a GIF when a still is not enough