HotShot

Shoot the screen, a window, a dragged-out region, a live web page, or a recording — then mark it up, dress it up, and export it. One menu-bar app for the whole trip from “I need a screenshot” to “here’s the finished image.”

Download free trial Read the docs

Or pick it up along with over twenty other apps — HotShot is included in my bundles.

What it does

◎

Six ways to shoot

Screen, window, dragged-out selection, live web page — plus record the screen or a single window. Hit them from the menu bar, or summon the panel with a global shortcut and press ⌘1–⌘6.

✦

Stage it first

Sweep the desktop icons out of sight, hide the menu bar, resize the target window to an exact size, and set a 3, 5, or 10-second delay. Everything goes back the way it was afterwards.

✎

Mark it up

Rectangles, ellipses, arrows, lines, callouts, crosses, text, and sticky notes — with snapping guides, ⌥-drag duplicates, multi-select, a whole-canvas crop, and a pixel loupe that reads exact colors.

▣

Make it presentable

Flip to the Compose tab and drop the flattened shot onto a real backdrop: title and caption, solid color or image behind it, padding, rounded corners, and a shadow or glow. Export a PNG.

▶

Recordings, refined

Crop the footage down to the part that matters, trim on a filmstrip, cut stretches out of the middle, add zoom spans that follow the pointer, and let HotShot draw a stylish synthetic cursor with a comet trail instead of the real one. Camera bubble and microphone optional.

⌘

Come back to it later

Save a recording session and reopen it to keep working: the footage, the webcam, the trim, the cuts, the zooms and every setting, exactly as you left them. Or open a video you already have and treat it the same way.

◱

Dress the video too

The same canvas treatment applies to recordings — backdrop, aspect ratio, padding, corner radius, shadow or glow, all framing whatever the crop leaves and rendered into the actual export. A transparent backdrop exports with a real alpha channel.

◧

Shoot the page you’re on

Browse to a page inside HotShot and shoot several viewport widths in one run — or use the Safari and Chrome extensions to hand over the page in your real browser, logged in and scrolled where you left it.

🔗

Copy a link, from your own storage

Publish a shot to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive and get a link on the clipboard. The file lands in your account — HotShot hosts nothing and stores no screenshots of yours anywhere.

Screenshots

HotShot’s capture panel open from the menu bar — Screen, Window, Selection and Web Page capture, screen and window recording, and options for delay, hiding desktop icons and the menu bar, camera and microphone

HotShot’s Markup canvas — a captured Safari window annotated with numbered callouts, arrows, an ellipse and a strikethrough, with the tool palette above

HotShot’s Compose tab — the same shot framed on a backdrop, with controls for backdrop, ratio, padding, corner and shadow, plus a title and caption

HotShot’s recording review — a trimmed clip on a filmstrip with a title, backdrop and cursor size, motion and click styling

HotShot’s General settings — menu bar icon and shortcut, whether captures open in Markup or Compose, and Dropbox link sharing

Get HotShot

Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later. HotShot asks for Screen Recording and Accessibility on first launch — it can’t capture a screen or resize a window without them. Buying more than one app? HotShot is included in my bundles, along with over twenty other apps.

Download free trial

Support

See the documentation for a full walkthrough. Questions, bug reports, or feature requests? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you’ll get a reply, usually within a day or two.

Also here: the privacy policy and the terms of service.