Built for daily use, not for the demo
Most screenshot tools are impressive once. This is the list of things that still matter on the fortieth screenshot of the week — the modes you reach for without thinking, and the small refusals to get in your way.
Nine ways to take one
01 — CaptureYou drag a box and a file lands on the desktop. Then the menu you were aiming at closes the moment you move the mouse. Then the page is longer than the screen. Then you need last time's size and you are measuring by eye. Nine modes, nine of those problems — none of them a workaround.
Capture Area
Drag anywhere, on any display. Hold C to make the selection a circle.
⌥⌘ACapture WindowFREE
Click a window to capture it with its shadow and rounded corners.
⌃⌥WCapture Full Screen
The whole display. With two monitors, it asks which one.
⌥⌘XCapture Fixed Size
Type an exact size. Next time it opens at the last size you used, so a series matches.
⌃⌥FScrolling Capture
Capture a page taller than your screen as one stitched image.
⌃⌥SSelf-Timer Capture
Start a countdown, then set up the screen before the capture fires.
⌃⌥TScreenshot Collection
Take a run of shots without opening the editor each time. Review them at the end.
OCR Text Capture
Select a region and copy the text, including from dialogs that do not allow copying.
⌃⌥ORecord Screen
Record video or GIF, with your camera in a bubble, plus mic and system audio.
⌥⌘KRecording has a page of its own — camera bubble, click effects, annotations while you record, GIF settings and frame rates are all on the screen recorder page.
And the screen holds still while you drag
Hover states, open menus, tooltips, a video mid-motion — they normally vanish the instant you reach for the mouse. Sowiks freezes the screen before the selection overlay appears, so what you were looking at is what you get.
Symmetry guides
While you drag a selection, Sowiks finds where the content actually ends and shows the gap on each side. Bring an edge near the point where both gaps match and it snaps there — keep dragging to override it, or hold I to switch the magnet off. Guides stay hidden over photos or gradients, where a content edge would be a guess.
Ten tools, and none of them locked
02 — AnnotateMost apps give you one kind of arrow. Blurring a password means exporting to something else. And whatever you draw looks like it was drawn in 2009. The whole editor here is free — no trial clock on it, no subscription.
Arrows
Straight, curved, dotted, thick and double-ended.
Shapes
Lines, boxes and circles, filled or not, plus a hand-drawn shape when a perfect ellipse is too neat.
Highlights
Tints and spotlights that dim the rest. Overlapping spotlights share one dim layer, so they do not stack darker.
Smart highlighter
Drag across a text line and the highlight snaps to the text instead of your hand movement.
Numbered steps
Step markers as numbers, letters or Roman numerals, for do-this-then-this instructions.
Text and callouts
Choose a typeface, or add a callout with a tail you can point.
Symbols
Drop icons from a built-in library onto the screenshot.
Redaction
Hide part of a screenshot with pixelation, blur or a solid block.
Crop and zoom
Crop with no fixed ratio, or to 1:1, 16:9, 4:3, 3:2, 4:5 and 9:16. Zoom in for precise edits.
Eyedropper
Pick a colour from the screenshot, so annotations can match the UI.
Stop shipping raw screenshots
03 — Make it presentableA raw screenshot in a deck, a landing page or a post looks like a raw screenshot. Everyone else's look designed. Doing that by hand is a trip to Figma every time.
Smart extend reads the colours at the edges of your shot and continues them outward, so the background belongs to the image instead of sitting behind it. Three ways to do it:
- Auto — Sowiks looks at the edge and picks between the two below.
- Colour — fill with the median colour along the edge.
- Stretch — carry the edge pixels themselves outward.
Decide once, then stop thinking about it
04 — Send itSave, find the file, open Slack, drag, wait, delete the file. Six steps to send one picture. Set what happens after a capture and it just happens.
Annotate first
The editor opens after every capture. Nothing else happens automatically.
Grab & paste
Send the capture straight to the clipboard. No editor, no file.
Grab & keep
Save a file to your folder and copy the image to the clipboard, without prompts.
Share a link
Upload the capture and copy the link to your clipboard. Requires a free account.
The clipboard keeps up with your edits
With copy-on-capture on, the shot was already on your clipboard before the editor opened — so drawing an arrow used to leave you pasting the version without it. Now the copy follows what you do, and refreshes the moment you leave Sowiks to go and paste. It stops the instant you copy something of your own. Your clipboard is yours.
Password and expiry on a link
Add a password and an expiry date to a shared link, or set it to never expire. Edit both later without making a new link.
Publish to your WordPress site
Connect a site once, then send captures to its media library from the menu bar. No download, upload form or wp-admin.
Compress before you send
Sowiks builds a palette from the screenshot and writes an indexed PNG, keeping flat UI colours exact while cutting file size.
Cloud that follows your account
Sign in and captures go to your Sowiks cloud, available from any Mac and the web. Free to sign in.
Out of your way, on purpose
05 — EverydayMenu bar only
No Dock icon and no extra window. Sowiks does not activate itself when capturing, so fullscreen Spaces and open menus stay put.
Pin to screen
Keep a screenshot floating above other windows while you copy a number or compare two versions.
Quick Access overlay
After each capture, a preview card appears in the corner with actions. Choose the corner and the delay.
Recent captures
A history kept whether or not you saved the file — for the screenshot you did not think to keep.
Your shortcuts
Nine actions can be bound to keys, with defaults included. Shortcuts match key position, so they work on non-Latin layouts.
Light, dark or system
Follow the macOS appearance and switch with it, or stay on the theme you choose.
PNG or JPEG, your call
Choose the save and share format. Set JPEG quality when a screenshot does not need to be lossless.
Where files land, and what they are called
Choose a folder for silent saves, or have Sowiks ask for a name when a timestamp will be hard to find later.
Driven by other apps
Raycast, Alfred, Shortcuts and scripts can start captures over sowiks:// — area, fixed size, full screen, scrolling, text or collection. Revocable in Preferences.
What's free and what isn't
06 — Pricing, brieflyFree, forever
Window capture · the full editor with every annotation tool · pin to screen · recent captures · saving to disk · the clipboard
No account, no trial clock, no nag.
Solo — one payment
Area, fixed-size, full-screen, scrolling and timed capture · collections · OCR · screen recording · smart background · cloud sharing
The trial starts on your first successful capture — not on install, not on a signup form. See pricing