Area selection with a loupe
An 11×11 pixel magnifier follows the pointer with a hex readout, so you can put an edge exactly where you meant to. Arrow keys nudge one pixel at a time.
Runs entirely on your Mac
Screenshots that land
on the exact pixel.
Shotbar is a menu-bar capture app for people who care where the edge of the box is. Dimmed selection with a live loupe, annotation that stays out of the way, and text recognition that never touches a server.
macOS 14+ Apple Silicon & Intel ~2 MB
1024 × 640
The screen freezes the moment you press the shortcut, so the selection never drifts and the overlay can never end up in your shot.
Features
Few things. All of them finished.
Every item below is implemented and reachable from a keyboard shortcut. There is no menu entry that opens a dialog which does nothing.
On-device text recognition
Pull text straight off the screen into the clipboard, or scan a QR code. Apple's Vision framework does it locally — no upload, no account.
Annotation that gets out of the way
Arrows you can bend, boxes, ovals, freehand, text, numbered steps and a highlighter. Select anything afterwards to move, restyle or delete it.
Three ways to hide something
Blur and pixelate for a soft touch, plus a solid black box when the content must not be recoverable. Shotbar tells you which is which.
Scrolling capture
Long pages and chat threads, stitched into one image by matching the overlap between frames. Works in any window, not only the browser.
Colour picker and ruler
Sample any pixel as hex, RGB or OKLCH, check contrast against WCAG or APCA, and measure distances without leaving the editor.
Pin a shot on top
Float a capture above everything else while you compare it with the real thing. Move it, scale it, close it when you are done.
Full resolution, always
Captures are written at your display's native pixel density and encoded straight from the bitmap, so nothing is upscaled or re-compressed.
No account, no telemetry
There is no sign-in, no analytics and no network code in the capture path. Your screenshots stay on the disk you saved them to.
The flow
Shortcut, drag, done.
Most captures never reach the editor. A small card appears where you were already looking, and you copy or save from the keyboard.
A card, not a window
After a capture Shotbar shows a floating thumbnail next to the region you framed. Everything on it responds to the keyboard, and you can drag the image straight into Finder, Slack or Mail.
- ↩ opens the editor, ⌘C copies, ⌘S saves
- ⌘T lifts the text out of the image
- Drag it anywhere that accepts an image
An editor that behaves like a Mac app
A unified toolbar, one undo history for everything including crops, and the shortcuts you already know. ⌘C copies the image — it does not do something clever instead.
- Single letters pick tools, ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z walk the history
- Marquee then ↩ to crop, and undo brings it back
- Zoom to 800% and pan; the status bar keeps the numbers honest
1
Compare
Where Shotbar differs.
Shottr and Snapzy are both good, and Snapzy is free and open source. This is an honest read of what each one gives you, so you can pick the right tool rather than the loudest one.
| Capability | Shotbar | Shottr | Snapzy | CleanShot X |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pixel loupe while selecting | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Frozen screen during selection | Yes | Yes | No | Optional |
| Scrolling capture | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| On-device OCR | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Non-recoverable redaction | Solid black box | Blur / pixelate | Blur / pixelate | Blur / pixelate |
| Screen recording | Short clips | No | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud upload | No | Yes | Your S3 | Hosted |
| Price | $29 once | $8–$40 once | Free | $29 once |
| Open source | No | No | Yes | No |
If you want cloud links or a full recording studio, Shotbar is the wrong choice. It deliberately has no upload service and no video timeline. What it has instead is a capture path that is correct at the pixel level and an editor that never surprises you.
Shortcuts
Everything has a key.
All of these are rebindable in Settings, and Shotbar warns you when another app has already claimed a combination instead of silently doing nothing.
- Capture area ⌥⌘⇧4
- Capture window ⌥⌘⇧5
- Capture screen ⌥⌘⇧3
- Copy text from screen ⌥⌘⇧8
- Repeat last area ⌥⌘⇧R
- Scrolling capture ⌥⌘⇧S
- Delayed capture ⌥⌘⇧D
- Start / stop recording ⌥⌘⇧6
Pricing
Pay once. No subscription.
A licence covers every update to the version you bought, on every Mac you own.
Capture
$29 one time
- Area, window and screen capture
- Full editor, redaction and export frames
- Scrolling capture, OCR, pin and colour tools
Pro
$79 one time
- Everything in Capture
- Screen recording with cursor-follow zoom
- On-device captions for recordings
Early access is unlocked. Licence enforcement is not switched on yet, so the current build is fully functional and exports are never watermarked. Buy when Shotbar has earned the slot in your menu bar.
FAQ
Questions worth answering.
Which Macs does it run on?
macOS 14 Sonoma or later, as a universal binary for both Apple Silicon and Intel. Shotbar needs Screen Recording permission, which macOS will ask for the first time you capture. Scrolling capture additionally needs Accessibility permission, because it has to scroll the page for you.
Does anything leave my Mac?
No. Text recognition and captions run through Apple's on-device frameworks, there is no analytics, no crash reporting and no account. Shotbar has no upload feature at all, which is a deliberate choice rather than a missing one.
Are exports watermarked?
Never. Copy and Save write exactly the image you annotated, at your display's native resolution. The decorative background frame is off by default and has to be turned on per export.
How is blur different from the black box?
Blur and pixelate change how pixels look but a determined person can partly recover the original, especially for text. The black box replaces the pixels with solid black, so there is nothing left to recover. Use the box for anything that actually matters.
Can I keep the macOS screenshot shortcuts?
Yes. Shotbar ships on ⌥⌘⇧ combinations so it never fights the system ones. If you would rather give ⌘⇧4 to Shotbar, turn the system shortcut off in System Settings and rebind Shotbar in its Shortcuts tab.
Why not just use Snapzy? It is free.
Often you should — it is a genuinely good app and it is open source. Choose Shotbar if you want the frozen-frame loupe for pixel-exact selection, irreversible redaction, and an editor whose undo history covers crops as well as annotations.
Give it a keyboard shortcut.
A signed Mac app. Unzip, drag it to Applications, and press ⌥⌘⇧4.
macOS 14+ Apple Silicon & Intel Signed. Notarisation needs a Developer ID