What it does

Four things, done properly.

Everything lives one keystroke away. Nothing opens a second window.

Capture

Drag a region, or hover a window and click once to take the whole thing — down to the menu bar and individual status bar icons. Hold ⇧ for several windows at once, each with a composed shadow.

Annotate

Nine tools, and anything drawn can be dragged afterward. Selection too small? Drag the edge — everything already drawn stays exactly where it is.

Pin

⌘P pins a capture above everything else. Zoomable, adjustable opacity, and it survives switching to a full-screen app.

Read the text

⌘E lifts text out of the picture — screenshots people send you, video subtitles, anything you can't select. ⇧⌘E translates it. Both run on-device.

Pick colours in sRGB

Press C under the magnifier. Mac displays are mostly Display P3 — raw pixel values pasted into CSS give a visibly different colour. SnipDot converts properly, and says so.

Backgrounds

Six presets add padding, rounded corners and a drop shadow in one click. G cycles them. Ready to post, no editor needed.

What it refuses

The list of things it won't do is the point.

Every line below is a decision, not an omission.

Touch the network

The sandbox entitlements contain no networking capability at all. Not “we promise not to” — it literally cannot. You can check the signature yourself.

Save without asking

Captures live in your clipboard. ⌘S opens a save panel and asks where. Most screenshots' life ends at paste; there's no reason to pile up a folder of junk.

Scrolling capture

The single most fragile feature in this category — dynamic content, textured backgrounds and fast scrolling all break the stitching. We'd rather do less, reliably.

Grow the interface

Thirteen toolbar slots, eight settings. That's the ceiling, and it's the standing answer to every future feature request.

Shortcuts

One key to start. Your mouse decides the rest.

⌥A brings it up — then drag to box-select, or click to take a window.

R O L A BRectangle · Ellipse · Line · Arrow · Pencil

M T N HPixelate · Text · Step · Highlight

CCopy the colour under the magnifier, as sRGB

GCycle background presets

⌘ZUndo

⌘CCopy to clipboard

⌘SSave — asks where, every time

⌘PPin on screen

⌘EExtract text · ⇧⌘E translate

escCancel — or right-click, anywhere, any stage

Privacy

Don't take our word for it.

SnipDot collects nothing, because it has no way to. One command proves it:

$ codesign -d --entitlements - /Applications/SnipDot.app com.apple.security.app-sandbox true com.apple.security.files.user-selected.read-write true # that's the whole list. no network entitlement.

Text recognition and translation both run on-device using what macOS already ships with. Nothing is uploaded, ever. Read the full policy ›

Languages

Five languages.

Terminology follows macOS itself, not a dictionary — so when SnipDot walks you to a system setting, the words match what you'll see there.

简体中文English繁體中文日本語한국어

A screenshot tool that knows when to stop.