macOS Screenshot Tricks to Impress Your Co-Workers

• ShareX

  578 27,580 9.3 C#

  ShareX is a free and open source program that lets you capture or record any area of your screen and share it with a single press of a key. It also allows uploading images, text or other types of files to many supported destinations you can choose from.

  

Windows-only recommendation so this is only somewhat related - but if you want a powerful, (mostly) well-thought-out, (seemingly) lightweight screenshot taker + editor on Windows, do have a look at ShareX[1].

It's completely free and you can tweak various workflows and map them to key combinations. I've had a "manual screenshot -> optional editing -> upload to imgur/save to clipboard" workflow bound to a mouse button (Logitech G600) for over 5 years and use it multiple times a day.

I downloaded it through Steam but whatever other download options they have should auto-update just fine as well, I would guess.

I only see this now but apparently the program is open-source. Never even knew that.

[1] https://getsharex.com/

• TRex

  14 1,114 4.6 Swift

  Copy any text on your screen, stop retyping.

  

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• Textractor

  75 1,912 2.9 C++

  Extracts text from video games and visual novels. Highly extensible.

There's a bunch of similar tools on Windows, usually for machine translating video games that haven't been localized.

eg https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor

• flameshot

  232 23,125 8.0 C++

  Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software :desktop_computer: :camera_flash:

  

• touch-bar-simulator

  11 1,885 0.0 Swift

  Use the Touch Bar on any Mac

• tesseract-ocr

  120 58,022 8.9 C++

  Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository)

  

• ImageOptim

  83 8,918 7.9 HTML

  GUI image optimizer for Mac

  

If you need to reduce the size of a screenshot it's often better to keep it as a PNG and reduce the number of colors. 256 colors nearly always carries all the information needed without blurring the edges or the text. Often 128 or 64 is fine. Don't use dithering - it harms the compression ratio, so you may as well use a few more colors instead.

Often just applying lossless PNG optimisations using a tool like https://imageoptim.com/mac will sometimes save a large percentage, although it can take a minute or so for the tool to finish.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• MonitorControl

  191 26,066 7.0 Swift

  🖥 Control your display's brightness & volume on your Mac as if it was a native Apple Display. Use Apple Keyboard keys or custom shortcuts. Shows the native macOS OSDs.

  

There is a really compelling reason on iOS: saving screen real estate. And the top-hidden search bar is convention now, just like the pull-to-refresh gesture. Discoverability is an issue though, I agree. But unnecessarily hidden? Disagree.

As for the monitor, just install Monitor Control: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

• Lunar

  192 4,323 8.9 Swift

  Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

Or Lunar if you want more automated adaptive brightness than what MonitorControl offers: https://lunar.fyi

Suggest a related project