Press the key. Drag the box. It's on your clipboard.
Screenshot Ultra is a native menu-bar app for macOS. Press a global hotkey, capture anything on screen — region, window, fullscreen, video, GIF, or clipboard image — annotate inline with eleven tools, and it lands on your clipboard before the shutter sound finishes. All local. No cloud. No telemetry. No account.
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MPJHorner/ScreenshotUltra/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
The local Mac alternative to CleanShot, Shottr, and friends.
macOS's built-in screenshot tool is great until you need to annotate, pin, repeat, or pipe the result somewhere. The polished competitors solve that — for a yearly subscription and a cloud account you didn't ask for. Screenshot Ultra is the local Mac alternative: every capture lives on your disk in a folder you choose, the annotation editor is a real NSWindow (not a Chromium tab), and the optional "share to anywhere" sink is a shell command you write.
Hotkey-first
Eleven default global hotkeys. Region, window, fullscreen, clipboard image, repeat-last, pin-last, eyedropper, video, GIF, preferences, cheat sheet. All rebindable.
Native annotation editor
A real NSWindow with eleven tools: pen, line, arrow, rect, ellipse, highlighter, redact, counter, text, blur, crop. Five-colour palette, three-step stroke width, full undo / redo.
Pin-to-screen
Floating always-on-top windows. Scroll to dim, ⌘+/⌘- to zoom, ⌫ to dismiss. Multiple pins cascade.
Video + GIF
Toggle hotkeys for start/stop recording. Click highlight, microphone, post-stop notifications. GIF post-processed via ffmpeg with a palette filter for crisp small files.
On-device OCR
Apple Vision pulls text out of any capture with one click. Pure on-device, no API keys, no network. Hex on clipboard.
Local-first
No accounts. No analytics. No auto-upload. Captures live on your disk. Optional "share to URL" is a shell command you wire up — every cloud, no SaaS in the middle.
From hotkey to clipboard, every which way.
Drag a rectangle. Esc cancels. The image is on your clipboard, file in ~/Pictures/ScreenshotUltra/, Quick Tray pops up bottom-right.
⌃⌥⌘1 → drag a region
Tap the Edit button on the Quick Tray. Draw an arrow, pixelate the password, drop a numbered counter on a UI step. ⌘S saves over the original.
↵ open editor → A pen → ⌘S
Want it on S3? Drop into settings.toml:
[sinks] shell = "rclone copy $1 s3:bucket/"
Every future capture runs through it. Detached, never blocks.
Press ⌃⌥⌘/ for the in-app Cheat Sheet listing every hotkey + editor tool, populated from your live bindings.
⌃⌥⌘/ → cheat sheet ⌃⌥⌘, → preferences ⌃⌥⌘P → colour picker
Ready to try it?
macOS 13 or newer · ~5 MB universal binary · no installer kernel extensions
Same posture across four tools.
Local-first developer tools. Snappy, native, MIT, no telemetry. Pair Screenshot Ultra with the rest:
MailBox Ultra
Local SMTP fake inbox with WebKit HTML preview. Catch every email your dev environment tries to send. github.com/MPJHorner/MailboxUltra ↗
Postbin Ultra
Local HTTP request inspector with JSON tree view, forward + replay. github.com/MPJHorner/PostbinUltra ↗
IDE Ultra
Local-first native code IDE in pure Rust + egui. github.com/MPJHorner/IdeUltra ↗