Changelog

Launch at login

• ShotSumo can start with your Mac. Off by default; turn it on in Preferences.
• Window capture answers the keyboard. Return shoots the window under the cursor, and ⌘C copies it or ⌘S saves it without opening the editor.
• Fixes. Choosing a save format in Preferences could snap back to the previous one and reopen the purchase sheet each time; a save could quietly fall back to PNG with nothing saying so; a locked tool could still draw; the lock badge on a tool button swallowed the click meant to open ShotSumo Pro; and shortcuts on function keys did not fire while a menu was open.

Capture and markup are now free

• Capture and markup are free, permanently. Region, window and full-screen capture, the rectangle, ellipse, arrow and text tools, undo, and copying or saving as PNG — no account, no time limit.
• ShotSumo Pro adds four editor tools. Pixelate for redacting, Spotlight for dimming everything outside a box, numbered Step badges, and export to AVIF or HEIC. There is still no watermark.
• PNG is the default save format again.
• Anyone who installed ShotSumo before version 2.0 keeps the four Pro tools, for good.

Capture

• The selection stays on screen after you let go. Drag out a region and the rectangle doesn't take the shot right away — resize it from a corner or an edge, drag inside it to move it, or drag outside it to start over. Press Return (or the numeric keypad's Enter), or double-click inside it, when it's right; Esc still backs out of the whole capture in one press.
• ⌘C and ⌘S work straight from that pending rectangle. Copy it to the clipboard or save it to your configured folder without opening the editor at all — whatever app you were using stays right where it was, and a brief confirmation appears near the bottom of the screen either way. ⌘C always copies PNG, the same as the editor's own Copy, because that's what other apps accept.
• The size readout moved, and picked up a new trick. It's now a small coloured badge above the selection's top-left corner instead of a pill underneath it, so it never sits on top of what you're capturing. It reads the exact pixel size; hold ⌥ during the drag on a Retina display and it also shows the point size, for as long as you hold it.
• An aspect-ratio lock, reached from a padlock inside that same badge once a rectangle is pending. Pick 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, their portrait inverses, or "Current Ratio" to freeze whatever shape is already on screen — it reshapes the pending rectangle immediately and holds every resize after that. It resets to free on the next capture unless "Remember aspect ratio" is turned on in Preferences.

Editor

• An editor window left open and untouched now closes itself instead of sitting there indefinitely — 15 minutes by default, changeable in Preferences, with a warning a minute before and any interaction cancelling it.
• ⌥-click a numbered step badge to remove it. Every badge after it renumbers to stay in sequence, and a single undo restores both the badge and the numbers it displaced.
• The empty area around the picture is now a quiet checkerboard instead of a flat field, the same convention other image editors use for "nothing here." It follows light and dark mode, and stays the same size at every zoom level.

Saving

• AVIF is now the default format for a new install. A typical screenshot lands at roughly a twelfth the size of the same picture as a PNG, with no difference you can see on a screenshot — but it is a lossy format where PNG is not. PNG and HEIC are still one click away in Preferences, and ⌘C still always copies PNG, because that's what other apps accept.

Preferences

• Export and import every preference and hotkey — handy when moving to a new Mac or after a reinstall. The save folder isn't included, since macOS ties its permission to the Mac it was chosen on; pick it again after importing.

Fixed

• A screenshot taken on a display rotated 90° or 270° no longer risks coming out with the wrong aspect ratio — the display's pixel dimensions are now corrected for the rotation before a capture is requested.
• The numbered step badge no longer takes its size from the shape tools' stroke width — like caption size, it now remembers its own. The toolbar's size control is also properly disabled, instead of present but inert, while the pixelate tool is selected.

Editor

• A spotlight tool. Draw a box and everything outside it dims, so a screenshot can point at what matters without an arrow or an outline. Draw as many bright spots as you need — they don't darken each other where they overlap — and anything you draw on top stays at full brightness.
• Numbered step badges, for a screenshot that walks through a sequence. Click to drop a filled circle with a number in it, and the next click is the next number; undo takes the count back with it. Each badge picks up the colour and size set in the toolbar, with its number kept legible against whichever colour that is.

Menu bar

• About ShotSumo, Rate…, and Visit the ShotSumo Website… are now in the menu-bar menu, grouped together above Quit.

ShotSumo Pro

• One subscription unlocks the whole app. Two weeks free, then $9.99 a year. Nothing is gated feature-by-feature, and there is no watermark — not now, not ever.
• Anyone who already had ShotSumo installed keeps using the whole app free, for good. The subscription applies only going forward.
• Manage or cancel any time in your Apple ID subscription settings, and restore a past purchase from inside the app with Restore Purchases.

Capture

• Capture Same Region Again. Repeat the last region straight into the editor, with no dimming and no drag. Trigger it from the menu bar, or set your own hotkey in Preferences. It's remembered for as long as ShotSumo is running, and greys out while the display it was taken on is disconnected.

Editor

• A text tool, alongside rectangle, ellipse, arrow and pixelate. Click on the capture and type — the words land straight on the picture. Re-open a caption to edit it, drag it to a new spot, or clear its text to remove it. Colour comes from the same swatches the shapes use, and size from the toolbar.
• The editor now opens on the tool, colour and stroke width you used last, instead of always starting from rectangle and red. Turn it off in Preferences ("Remember last tool and colour") to always start from the defaults.
• Save, Copy, Undo, Redo and Close now live together under one Screenshot menu, instead of being split across File and Edit.

Fixed

• A screenshot of one display can no longer come back showing a different one, and a capture that hangs no longer disables screenshots for the rest of the session — every capture now gives up after ten seconds instead of waiting forever, with the hotkey, menu bar and Capture Same Region Again all still working afterward.
• The editor now opens at the size the capture really is and saves it at the resolution it really has, instead of taking both from whichever display the pointer happened to be on — and a small capture no longer opens a window too narrow to show its own tools.
• Screenshots from a wide-colour display keep their full colour when saved or copied instead of coming out visibly duller, and two screenshots saved in the same second no longer overwrite each other.
• The first save right after choosing a folder can no longer disappear without a trace, and Preferences now always shows the folder screenshots are actually being saved into.
• Undo and Redo no longer throw away a caption you're still typing — it's committed first now, so the press undoes one step like it does everywhere else.
• Text you're typing onto a capture now looks like the caption you'll get, instead of a pale outline that only turns solid once you finish, and re-opening a caption keeps its own colour and size instead of repainting it in whatever the toolbar was last set to.
• Copy (⌘C) now reports a failure instead of saying "Copied" when the image couldn't actually be placed on the clipboard.
• Window capture with nothing to pick, a multi-display capture where one display fails to freeze, and a re-capture that fails now show a failure alert naming what went wrong, instead of a frozen screen, a half-frozen desktop, or a vague alert about "any display."
• A long editing session no longer grows in memory without limit — the undo history now keeps a hundred steps, far more than anyone unwinds by hand.
• A purchase held for a parent's or bank's approval now updates itself once approved, instead of still saying it's waiting until you close and reopen the purchase sheet.

Saving

• Screenshots can be saved as AVIF or HEIC, not only PNG. Pick the format once in Preferences and every save uses it — still one keystroke, still no dialog to answer. PNG stays the default: a screenshot saved as AVIF is around a twelfth the size of the same picture as a PNG, and as HEIC around a quarter, but both are lossy where PNG is not. AVIF opens in any browser, HEIC is native to Apple's own apps.
• Copy still puts a PNG on the clipboard whichever format you picked, because PNG is what other apps actually accept from it.

Preferences

• An About section, with the version — click it to copy — and links to this site, what's new, the feedback form, and the privacy policy and terms.

Editor

• A plain empty field around the picture instead of grey window filler, with a hairline marking exactly where the screenshot ends. Stretch the window wider than the capture and it stays obvious what is part of the image and what is not.

The first public version of ShotSumo, on the Mac App Store. Everything below is what the app does on day one, plus the changes made during review that are worth calling out because they decide how it behaves the first time you use it.

Capture

• Region, window and full screen. Region capture freezes the screen and draws its own selection overlay on the frozen picture, so the overlay can never appear in the result. Multi-monitor setups get one full-screen item per display.
• A global hotkey for region capture, bound to ⌘⇧9 out of the box and rebindable. Window and full-screen capture ship unbound on purpose.
• Esc cancels the selection overlay, and so does a right-click or a click without a drag. Nothing is captured when you cancel.

Editor

• Rectangle, ellipse, arrow and pixelate, each with its own colour and stroke width, with undo, redo and zoom. Pixelate rewrites the pixels underneath before export, so a redaction cannot be undone by whoever receives the image.
• File and Edit menus. Save, Copy, Undo and Redo are reachable from the menu bar and not only from keyboard shortcuts and two unlabelled toolbar buttons.
• Esc closes the editor, and the window closes itself after a successful save — matching what it already did after a copy.

Saving

• You choose the folder, and the app never guesses. The first time you save, ShotSumo asks where files should go in the standard macOS dialog. Every save after that goes straight there with no dialog. If that folder later becomes unreachable — an unmounted volume, a moved directory — ShotSumo asks again instead of quietly writing somewhere else.
• Copy puts a flattened PNG on the clipboard at full native resolution.

Privacy and packaging

• Not permitted to use the network at all, not just choosing not to. So "nothing is sent anywhere" is a fact about the app rather than a promise about its behaviour.
• Sandboxed, with access to exactly one folder outside its own space: the one you picked.
• Free, with no watermark and nothing to buy.

Fixed before release

• A capture that genuinely fails — the screen recording permission revoked, for example — now explains itself with an alert. It used to do nothing at all, which looked exactly like cancelling on purpose.
• A denied Screen Recording permission no longer locks the app out of ever asking again. The app had recorded that it had asked once; the system had forgotten the answer; between them there was no way back without a terminal.