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.
You 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.
Drag anywhere, on any display. Hold C and the selection becomes a circle.
⌥⌘AClick a window, get the window — shadow and rounded corners intact.
⌃⌥WThe whole display. Two monitors? It asks which one instead of guessing.
⌥⌘XType an exact size. It reopens at the last one you used, so a series matches.
⌃⌥FA page taller than your screen, stitched into one image.
⌃⌥SA countdown, so you can set the scene before it fires.
⌃⌥TA run of shots without the editor interrupting. Work through them at the end.
Select a region, get the text — even from an error dialog that will not let you copy.
⌃⌥OVideo or GIF, with your camera in a bubble, your mic and system audio.
⌥⌘KHover 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.
Guides snap to real content edges, not a grid · Retina shots can come out at 1× · Optional 1px border for white UI on white pages
Most 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.
Straight, curved, dotted, thick and double-ended.
Lines, boxes and circles, filled or not — plus a hand-drawn one for when a perfect ellipse looks too formal.
Tints and spotlights that dim everything else. Two overlapping spotlights share one dim layer instead of stacking into a dark mess.
Drag across a line of text and the highlight snaps to the text, not to your shaky hand.
Counters in numbers, letters or Roman numerals, for do-this-then-this.
Real typeface choices, and a callout with a tail you can point.
A library of icons to drop on top.
Pixelate, blur or a solid block. For the thing that should not have been in the screenshot.
Aspect ratio presets, and zoom for precise work.
Pick a colour off the screenshot itself, so your arrow matches the UI you are annotating.
A 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.
Save, 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.
The editor opens every time. Nothing else happens on its own.
Straight to the clipboard. No editor, no file.
A file in your folder and the image on the clipboard, no prompts.
Uploaded, with the link on your clipboard. Needs a free account.
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.
No Dock icon, no window in your way. Sowiks never activates itself when you capture, so it cannot kick you out of a fullscreen Space or close the menu you were shooting.
Float a screenshot above everything else while you copy a number off it or compare two versions.
A preview card in the corner after each capture, with the actions right there. Your corner, your delay.
A history, kept whether or not you saved the file. The whole point of it is the screenshot nobody thought to keep.
Nine actions, each bindable, with sensible defaults out of the box. Matched by key position, so they work on a non-Latin keyboard layout too.
Follows macOS and switches with it, or stays where you put it.
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.
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