User Guide

Shotlet lives in the menu bar — no permanent Dock icon. Click its menu bar icon to reach the commands and Settings. Each command also has a global shortcut that works from any app.

Rebind any of them in Settings › Shortcuts: record a new combination, Remove Shortcut to leave a command unbound, or Restore Default.

Screen Recording

Snip has to read what is on the display, which macOS gates behind the Screen Recording permission. The Welcome window covers it on first launch; afterwards the switch lives in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen Recording.

Capturing

Snip and Snip & Copy both freeze one still frame of the display and dim it, so nothing moves while you decide what to take.

The frontmost window under the pointer is highlighted as soon as the overlay appears and follows the pointer. After you scroll to a window behind it, that window stays highlighted until the pointer leaves its frame.

• Drag to select a region; hold ⇧ for a square.
• Click to take the highlighted window or element.
• Scroll to step through overlapping windows under the pointer, from front to back. It stops at each end.
• ⇥ changes what is highlighted for this capture. On macOS 27 the first press switches to elements: rest the pointer on a button, a row, a card, or an image and the highlight snaps to it; click to take it. The next press turns highlighting off, so only a dragged region can be captured, and the press after that returns to windows. On older systems it turns window highlighting off and on. Each snip starts with windows.
• ⎋ cancels and leaves the screen as it was.

Snip puts the result on screen as a pin; Snip & Copy sends it to the clipboard. Both save to History.

Pins

A pin is a floating window holding one capture. It stays above your other windows until you close it.

• Scroll to zoom between 25% and 400% — trackpad pinch works too.
• ⌘ and scroll to fade between 100% and 20%, so you can read what is underneath.
• Drag to move, double-click to close.
• Space shows and hides the toolbar: annotation tools, Text Selection, copy, save.
• ⌥⇧P hides every pin at once and brings them all back, without closing any.

While an annotation tool is selected, scroll sets the line width instead of the zoom, and double-click draws instead of closing. Showing the toolbar alone leaves the plain gestures in place; hide it to get them back.

Text Selection in the toolbar lets you select and copy text straight out of the pin, and opens a small bar underneath. Turn on Tables & Lists and every table and list Shotlet recognizes gets a dashed outline; hover one and click Copy Table or Copy List. Numbers, Excel, and Notes paste real cells, and Markdown editors get a Markdown table. Anything you have pixelated copies as ••••.

Auto Redact, next to it, pixelates every phone number, email address, Chinese resident ID number, and bank card number in the pin in one step, and tells you how many it covered; undo takes them all back. Recognition can miss text, so look before you share. To fix a miss, pixelate it with the Mosaic tool.

Translate, the third button, paints the translation of every paragraph over the pin, where the original was and in its colors. Select translated text and press ⌘C, or ⌘A for all of it; anything you have pixelated stays •••• in the translation. Shotlet writes in your first preferred language that differs from the text’s; choose another in Settings › General › Translate To. The first time you translate between two languages, macOS asks to download them. Translation runs on your Mac with Apple’s Translation framework.

Annotating

Open a pin’s toolbar, or use Markup on a History item. Eight tools — rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, pen, marker, mosaic, and text — in red, yellow, green, blue, black, or white. Crop sits next to Color: drag a marquee, adjust the handles, and confirm. The original capture stays; undo restores it. On macOS 27, click an element instead of dragging: Crop snaps the marquee to it, and Mosaic pixelates it.

• Scroll adjusts the line width.
• Shift constrains the axis or the aspect ratio while drawing.
• Right-click or ↩ commits the selected shape; ⌫ deletes it.
• Undo and redo throughout, and a shape stays editable after you draw it.

Annotations are saved with the capture and travel with it across your Macs.

History

Search runs against the text your captures show — text recognized inside them and text you add with the Text tool — so a capture can be found by an error message or a name written in it. Text under a mosaic or cropped away is not searchable. ⌘F focuses the field; a second press selects the query. That recognition is Apple’s Vision framework running on your own Mac — the image is never uploaded. The same engine backs Text Selection, Shotlet’s Live Text support, which lets you select and copy text straight out of a capture.

Turn on Text Selection and the same bar as on a pin appears above the capture: Tables & Lists outlines recognized tables and lists to copy, and Auto Redact pixelates phone numbers, emails, Chinese resident ID numbers, and bank card numbers in the capture’s annotations — they travel with it, and ⌘Z takes them back. Translate paints the translation over the capture, as on a pin.

Every item can be pinned back to the desktop, copied, saved, shared, marked up, or deleted. Deleting one does not touch a pin already on screen.

Select more than one item the way Finder does — click, ⌘-click, ⇧-click, and the arrow keys. Copy, pin, save, share, and delete then apply to the whole selection. Two or more items show a stacked thumbnail instead of the editor; markup and Text Selection wait until you are back to one.

Nothing expires by default. Settings › General › Remove History Items can clear items automatically after a day, a week, two weeks, a month, or a year.

Spotlight and Shortcuts

Shotlet’s actions run from Spotlight and the Shortcuts app as well as from its menu and keyboard shortcuts: Snip, Snip & Copy, Paste, Show or Hide Pins, Open History, Open History Item, Pin History Item, Find History Items, and Pin Image, which pins an image file and adds it to History. Type one in Spotlight and press Return. Siri takes Snip, Snip & Copy, Paste, and Open History by name.

Spotlight also finds captures by the same text. A result shows when you took the capture and its first line; opening it selects the capture in History. Only what a capture shows is searchable: text under a mosaic or cropped away stays out. The index stays on this Mac. Settings › General › Show History in Spotlight turns it off and removes it.

In Shortcuts, Find History Items finds captures with History’s search syntax: up to 50 matches, newest first, or the 20 newest when the search is blank. Each passes on as the image Copy exports, annotations and crop included, so it works with any action that takes an image.

Syncing

History and its annotations sync through the private database of your own iCloud account. Shortcuts, Remove History Items, and Translate To sync separately through iCloud Key-Value storage; that channel can stay off even when history works (for example if iCloud Drive is off). Launch at Login, Welcome, and pin windows stay on this Mac. Privacy covers what is stored and where.