Features

Region capture (freeze-frame)

Bound to ⌘⇧9 by default. The screen is captured first, so menus, hover states and animations stay exactly as they were at the moment you pressed the key — only then do you drag a marquee on the frozen picture. Releasing the mouse doesn't take the shot: the rectangle stays on screen with eight grips, one at each corner and one at each edge midpoint. Drag a grip to resize the rectangle, drag from inside it to move it, or drag from outside it to start a fresh marquee, discarding the one you had.

A caption under the rectangle names the keys — ⏎ capture · ⌘C copy · ⌘S save · ⎋ cancel — and Return, the numeric keypad's Enter, or a double-click inside the rectangle commits it to the editor. Esc backs out of the whole capture in one press, from the marquee or from the pending rectangle alike — there's no separate "back to the marquee" step. The border and its grips switch colour to stay visible on whatever's underneath — white over dark content, blue over light — so a rectangle drawn over a dark window doesn't wash out against it. A selection still can't span two displays.

⌘C and ⌘S also work straight from the pending rectangle, with no need to open the editor at all: ⌘C copies it to the clipboard and ⌘S saves it to your configured folder, and whatever app was in front before the capture started stays in front — a brief confirmation appears near the bottom of the screen either way. ⌘C always copies PNG regardless of the Format preference, the same rule the editor's own Copy command follows; ⌘S uses whichever format is configured (PNG by default), asks for a folder the first time if none is chosen yet, and honours "Reveal in Finder after save" the same way an ordinary editor save does. Neither shortcut does anything before the first drag — with the overlay up and nothing pending yet, ⌘C and ⌘S are inert.

Selection size badge

While you drag out a region, an accent-coloured pill sits above the selection's top-left corner and reads 1360 × 770 px in monospaced digits — the exact dimensions of the image file you'll end up with, in device pixels, not points. Drag the selection right up to the top of the display and the badge tucks inside the edge instead of getting pushed off screen. There's no badge before you've dragged anything — with nothing selected yet, the overlay is a plain scrim.

The badge doesn't go away when you let go of the mouse. Releasing leaves the rectangle pending (see Region capture, above), and the badge stays parked above its top-left corner for as long as it's pending — that persistence is what makes the padlock inside it clickable at all: it's a control inside the badge, so the badge has to still be on screen for there to be anything to click.

Hold ⌥ while you drag and the badge appends the point size on the same line, smaller and dimmer: 1360 × 770 px · 680 × 385 pt. Let go of ⌥ and it drops back to pixels alone. On a display that isn't Retina, holding ⌥ changes nothing — the two numbers would be identical. There's no Preferences toggle for this, no menu item, and no on-screen hint: this page is the only place to find out it exists.

A small padlock sits inside the badge, in the separator slot between the two numbers — an open shackle for a free selection, closed once a ratio is locked, and the same width either way, so locking never changes the badge's width. Click it for a menu: Free first, then 1:1, then landscape 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, then portrait 3:4, 2:3, 9:16, then Current Ratio, which names the number it would freeze — Current Ratio (1.60:1), say — reading whichever rectangle is currently pending, or the last region you captured if nothing is pending yet; it's greyed out only when there's nothing to freeze. Pick a ratio while a rectangle is pending and it reshapes immediately, anchored on the rectangle's top-left corner — the top and left edges hold still, and it grows right and down to the new shape. Once a ratio is set, it constrains every resize and every new drag that follows, and the badge appends it after the pixel size instead of replacing the numbers: 1550 × 872 px · 16:9.

By default a lock lasts for one capture only — start a fresh region capture and it's back to Free, with nothing to clear by hand. Preferences → Editor Behavior → Remember aspect ratio keeps it set across captures instead, until you change it again. Either way it never survives quitting ShotSumo — a ratio set on Monday silently shaping an unrelated drag on Friday is exactly what that resets.

Window capture and full-screen capture

Window capture grabs one whole window under the cursor. Full-screen capture grabs an entire display — one menu item per connected display once more than one is attached. Both ship unbound on purpose, so a fresh install can't collide with a shortcut you already rely on; bind either one in Preferences and it becomes active immediately.

Capture Same Region Again

Repeats your last region capture straight into the editor — no dragging, no dimming. It's remembered only for as long as ShotSumo keeps running; quit and reopen and there's nothing to repeat until you make a fresh region capture. The menu item greys out while the display that region was taken on is disconnected, rather than capturing the wrong screen.

Rectangle, ellipse, arrow

Three vector shapes, drawn by dragging on the canvas, each in the toolbar's current colour and stroke width.

Text captions

Click on the capture and type — the words land straight on the picture with a contrasting outline so they read over any background, light or dark. A placed caption stays editable: click it again to keep typing, or drag it to a new spot. Colour comes from the same swatches the shapes use.

Pixelate — requires ShotSumo Pro

Drag a region to mosaic it — redact a name, a face, or a stray password field before sharing. It has no colour control, and the toolbar's stroke-width control is visibly disabled while Pixelate is selected — faded out, not merely inert — with a tooltip reading "Stroke width does not apply to Pixelate." Only the drag itself sets the size of the mosaic block.

Spotlight — requires ShotSumo Pro

Draw a box and a 55% black wash covers everywhere outside it — fixed, not a preference — while the drawn region itself keeps the picture's original brightness. Draw more than one: the wash never stacks where regions overlap, and any shapes or captions added on top stay at full strength over it.

Numbered step badges — requires ShotSumo Pro

Click to drop a filled, numbered circular badge — the next click is the next number, starting at 1. The badge picks up the toolbar's current colour, but its size is remembered separately from the shape tools' stroke width — changing one no longer changes the other, the same way the text tool's caption size already works on its own. Its numeral is drawn with a thin contrast rim so it stays legible whichever colour that is. Undo removes the last badge placed and the count goes back with it — there is no separate counter to reset. With the step tool selected, ⌥-click any existing badge to remove it — every badge after it renumbers down by one — and a single undo restores both the removed badge and the numbers it displaced.

Screenshot menu — Save, Copy, Undo, Redo, Close

All five live in one Screenshot menu in the menu bar, rather than split across File and Edit — there is no document to open and nothing to paste into. ⌘S saves, ⌘C copies a flattened, full-resolution PNG to the clipboard regardless of the Format preference, ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, and ⌘W closes the window.