Capture the screen. Own the file.

A native macOS capture tool that lives in the menu bar. Region, window or full screen, a real annotation editor, silent MP4 recording, and the file on your disk — or on storage you control. No account, no telemetry, about two megabytes.

Download for macOS Why we built it

macOS 14 Sonoma or later Apple Silicon & Intel ~2 MB No account required

The Inkcap app icon: an ink cap mushroom dissolving into a pool of black ink.

Inkcap lives where the other menu-bar extras do. Four shortcuts, one menu, and it stays out of the way until you press one.

~2 MB
The whole app, downloaded
0
Accounts you have to create
3–60s
Silent H.264 MP4 recording
⌃⇧1–4
Global shortcuts, all rebindable

The frame freezes before you draw.

The screen is captured first and cropped second. You drag over a still image, so the selection overlay can never end up inside the file, and the crop is exact to the pixel.

Any region, on any display

Drag a box across one monitor or several. Inkcap picks the right display and returns pixels, not a scaled-up approximation.

The window you actually see

Window capture follows the window server’s front-to-back order, so clicking a stack grabs the window on top — the one in your way, not the one behind it.

Silent video, 3 to 60 seconds

H.264 MP4 with a countdown, a live duration readout and an early stop. No audio channel is ever created, which is why Inkcap never asks for your microphone.

Straight to the clipboard

Every capture is written to the pasteboard as both PNG and TIFF, so it pastes correctly whichever format the app you are pasting into happens to expect.

An annotated screenshot of a dashboard: a red box around the Q3 revenue figure, a green arrow into the tallest bar, a yellow highlighter across an overdue invoice row, numbered markers 1 and 2, an API key smeared out with blur, a customer avatar reduced to mosaic, and a caption reading “redacted before it left the Mac”.

This image came out of the app’s rendering engine, not a mockup. The preview and the exported file are produced by the same code, so what you arrange on screen is what lands in the file.

The editor is included, not upsold.

Capture, and the editor opens on the shot you just took. No second app, no separate purchase, no round trip through a website.

  • Arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, freehand pen and highlighter
  • Text boxes and auto-numbered steps that count 1, 2, 3 for you
  • Blur and pixelate for passwords, names and account numbers
  • Non-destructive crop you can resize by the corners and undo
  • Unlimited undo, plus arrow-key nudging pixel by pixel
  • PNG, JPEG, HEIC or TIFF out, to disk or to the clipboard

It goes where you tell it to.

By default that means a folder on your Mac. If you want a link you can paste to someone, point Inkcap at storage that belongs to you — the upload path is opt-in and off until you configure a destination.

Credentials are kept in the macOS Keychain. For FTP, FTPS and SFTP, Inkcap calls the curl and sftp tools that already ship with macOS, and only while an upload you started is running.

  • Local diskAny folder you choose, with your own filename pattern
  • S3-compatibleAWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO, and anything else speaking the same API
  • Custom HTTPYour own endpoint, your own headers and auth
  • FTP / FTPSPlain or TLS, with explicit or implicit FTPS
  • SFTPKey or password authentication over SSH
  • ClipboardPNG and TIFF at once, so it pastes everywhere

Four shortcuts worth memorising.

They work from any app, and every one of them can be rebound in Preferences if it collides with something you already use.

Capture region⌃⇧1
Capture full screen⌃⇧2
Capture window⌃⇧3
Record video⌃⇧4
Copy to clipboard⌘C
Save⌘S
Undo⌘Z
Delete selection⌫

Why we built Inkcap

A note from the people who make it.

The Inkcap team inkcap.cloud

Screenshots used to be instant. Press a shortcut, drag a box, and the file was already on your disk. Somewhere along the way that stopped being true.

Most of the good tools moved to a subscription, and their free tiers are built to move you toward paying: a watermark in the corner, a monthly upload cap, links that expire, features that were free last year sitting behind a new tier this year. None of that is a capture feature. It is pricing wearing a capture tool’s clothes.

Others are web apps wrapped in a desktop shell. They ship an entire browser runtime to do a job the operating system already does, so they hold hundreds of megabytes of memory and take a noticeable moment to open. A screenshot should be finished before that moment is over.

And more and more often, the simple act of copying an image asks you to create an account first — or quietly routes the file through somebody else’s server when all you wanted was a file.

That last part is the one that bothers us. Think about what is actually on your screen when you reach for a capture tool: a password manager, a customer record, a contract nobody has signed yet, work you have not shipped. Those are the most sensitive pixels you own. They should not become somebody else’s upload by default.

So we built the opposite. Inkcap is a native macOS app: about two megabytes, open the instant you press the shortcut, with the annotation editor included rather than sold back to you. Captures land on your disk by default. If you want them somewhere else, you point Inkcap at your own S3-compatible bucket, your own HTTP endpoint, or your own FTP, FTPS or SFTP server — your credentials, your storage, your rules. Updates are verified by signature before they install, and that check can be turned off. There is no account to create and there is no telemetry of any kind.

No metered uploads, no expiring links, nothing that quietly changes underneath you between releases. A menu-bar app that does one job properly, then gets out of your way.

About the name: an ink cap is a small mushroom that grows overnight and then dissolves itself into a pool of black ink. Which is more or less what a screenshot is — something you saw, turned into something you can mark up.

How it compares

Three categories of tool, nine things that matter when you are trying to get a screenshot out of your way. Category behaviour, not product names.

Comparison of Inkcap with typical freemium web tools and typical Electron apps
Feature Inkcap Typical freemium web tool Typical Electron app
Native app, opens instantly Yes A menu-bar app at about 2 MB, with no browser runtime in the way No Runs in a browser tab; capture begins only after the page has loaded Partly A desktop shell around a browser runtime — native to the eye, not to the machine
Annotation editor included Yes Arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, pen, highlighter, text, numbered steps, blur, pixelate, crop — all of it Partly Basic markup is usually free; the better tools commonly sit in a paid tier Yes Usually bundled in, with a narrower toolset than a dedicated editor
Local file by default Yes Writes to the folder you chose; uploading never happens unless you set it up No The hosted upload is the product; a local copy is often an export step Yes Commonly saves to disk, though the share flow may push you to its cloud
Upload to your own storage Yes S3-compatible, custom HTTP, FTP, FTPS or SFTP — your credentials, kept in the Keychain No The vendor’s hosting, on the vendor’s terms Partly Sometimes, usually through a plugin, a script or a paid tier
No account required Yes Nothing to sign up for, nothing to sign in to, ever No Sign-in is commonly required before you can host or share anything Partly Varies widely; some require an account for sync or cloud features
No analytics Yes No usage analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers No Usage analytics and session recording are common on hosted pages Partly Often includes telemetry, sometimes with an opt-out switch
Works offline Yes Capture, annotate and save never touch the network at all Partly The page may load from cache, but hosting and sharing need the network Yes Ordinarily yes, unless the app is a thin client for a service
Update checks you can turn off Yes Signature-verified before installing, and the daily check can be disabled No The service changes server-side on the vendor’s schedule, not yours Partly Auto-update commonly ships without an off switch in the interface
Cost model Yes Nothing metered, no expiring links, no upload quota — storage is yours, so there is nothing for us to count No Free tiers are commonly capped by uploads, retention or watermarks, with subscriptions above Partly Commonly a one-time purchase, with pro features sold as an upgrade

This table describes how each category of tool typically behaves, not any specific product. Individual apps differ, and plenty are better than their category suggests. Marks are paired with a qualifier wherever a plain yes or no would be misleading.

No telemetry at all

No analytics, no crash reports, no advertising identifiers, no account. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you asked for it to.

Updates you can verify

Update packages are checked against an Ed25519 signature and the code signature. A package that fails verification is never installed.

Local-first, by design

Everything stays on your disk by default. Uploading only happens after you configure a destination yourself — never before.

Questions, answered plainly

Why does Inkcap ask for Screen Recording permission?

macOS requires it of every app that captures the screen, without exception. You grant it in System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Screen Recording. Inkcap only reads the screen while a capture you started is running.

How do updates arrive?

Once a day Inkcap checks a small version file. If there is something new it tells you, downloads only when you agree, verifies the signature, and then installs. The daily check can be switched off in Preferences.

Is there audio in the recordings?

No. Recordings are silent by design: no audio channel is created and the microphone permission is never requested.

Where do my files go?

By default to ~/Pictures/Inkcap. You can point that at any folder you like in Preferences, or send a shot to the clipboard instead of writing a file at all.

Do I have to use the upload feature?

No. Uploading is entirely optional and off until you configure a destination. Inkcap never has a server of its own to send anything to.

Which Macs and macOS versions are supported?

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. The app is built as a universal binary, so the same download works on either.

Two megabytes between you and a finished screenshot.

Download it, press ⌃⇧1, and see how a capture tool feels when it is not trying to sell you a plan.

Download Inkcap for macOS Email support

macOS 14 Sonoma or later Apple Silicon & Intel ~2 MB No account, no telemetry