Frequently Asked Questions

ShotBrew is a menu bar app - there is no main window. Look for the small lightning-bolt icon in the macOS menu bar (top-right of the screen, next to the clock). Click it to open the menu with every capture and recording action. If you don't see the icon, the menu bar may be full - see the troubleshooting section below.

macOS requires the Screen Recording permission for any app that captures the screen - including screenshots. This is a one-time setup:

1. Take your first capture - macOS shows the permission prompt.
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording.
3. Turn the toggle on for ShotBrew and relaunch the app when asked.

Recording with a microphone additionally asks for the Microphone permission, and Auto Captions ask for Speech Recognition - each appears only the first time you use that feature.

No. Capture, recording, OCR, translation, speech-to-text, face detection and automatic redaction all run entirely on your Mac. The app has no analytics and no telemetry. It goes online for three things only: validating your license (a pseudonymous Machine ID), checking for updates, and redeeming a promo code if you enter one. Translation language packs and dictation models are downloaded by macOS itself, from Apple. Our website counts anonymous page views (Cloudflare Web Analytics: no cookies, no profiles, no cross-site tracking). See the Privacy Policy for details.

Yes. ShotBrew is distributed as a direct download, code-signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple - macOS verifies the app is unmodified every time it launches. Download it only from shotbrew.app.

Open the menu bar icon → Settings → Shortcuts. Every action - captures, OCR, scrolling capture, recording, tools - has its own shortcut, and each one can be remapped or disabled. Changes apply immediately.

No. Keyboard shortcuts go through the system hotkey API, which delivers only the combinations you assigned. ShotBrew uses neither Accessibility nor Input Monitoring and has no key logger; the only global monitors it installs are for the mouse, so recordings know where you clicked. Screen Recording is the one permission it cannot work without; Microphone, Camera and Speech Recognition are asked for only when the feature that needs them is used.

Yes. Everything - capture, recording, OCR, translation, speech-to-text and the whole video editor - runs on your Mac with no internet connection. ShotBrew only goes online to validate your license, to check for updates and to redeem a promo code; the license is cached, so a Mac that stays offline for a while keeps working.

No - ShotBrew is pure native Swift built on Apple’s ScreenCaptureKit, AVFoundation and Vision, not an Electron web app. It idles quietly in the menu bar with a small memory footprint and uses the system’s efficient capture pipeline while recording.

Yes - ShotBrew Guide in the menu (and under Settings → About) is a built-in handbook: 36 short chapters with search, in ten languages, opened once automatically after the first launch. The What to set up first chapter is live: it shows which permissions this Mac has granted, whether the save folder is writable and whether another app has reserved one of your shortcuts, with a button that opens the right place.

Open the menu bar icon → Capture, or use the shortcuts:

• ⌃⌥4 - Area: drag to select a rectangle. The window under the cursor is outlined as you hover - a plain click (no drag) captures exactly that window's area, no need to trace its edges.
• ⌃⌥3 - Fullscreen: capture the entire screen.
• ⌃⌥5 - Window: pick the window from a list with search; it is captured on its own, on an optional styled background, with the window shadow trimmed.

Every shortcut is customizable in Settings → Shortcuts.

Use Scrolling Capture (⌘⇧7):

1. Pick the area to capture (for example, the browser content).
2. Scroll the page yourself, slowly and smoothly, down to the end.
3. ShotBrew stitches all the frames into one tall image automatically.

It works in any app you can scroll - browsers, chats, documents. There is also Add Capture (stitch below) to assemble a tall image piece by piece.

Press ⌘⇧6 (Capture Text) and select the area - the text inside is recognized on-device and copied straight to the clipboard. To translate the captured text at the same time, use Capture Text & Translate (⌃⌥6, macOS 15+). Nothing is uploaded anywhere - recognition and translation run on your Mac.

That depends on Settings → General → After Capture → Default action:

• Copy to clipboard - the image goes to the clipboard only (nothing is written to disk - the most common reason a file "is missing").
• Copy + Save - copied and saved to your save folder.
• Open in editor - copied and the annotation editor opens.

The menu also has a quick Auto-Save toggle that switches between the first two without opening Settings.

Open the capture in the editor (set After Capture to Open in editor, or use the Quick Access card). Tools: arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, pencil, highlighter, text in nine fonts, numbered step badges, a magnifier loupe and spotlight. To hide something use Redact: it destroys the covered pixels and paints a flat, blurred or pixelated look over them. Soft blur is cosmetic only - a real blur can be reversed, so it is never the right tool for a password.

Yes. The eye button in the editor scans the image on-device for e-mails, phone numbers, card numbers, IBANs, API keys and tokens and IP addresses, and turns each finding into a Redact box you can adjust. Turn on Redact sensitive text automatically in Settings → General and the same scan runs before a capture reaches the clipboard, the disk or the history. Redact replaces the pixels with an opaque plate - nothing underneath can be reconstructed. Detection is a helper, not a guarantee: look over the result before sharing.

Two ways. A Window capture (⌃⌥5) lands on a styled background automatically - wallpaper, a custom image, a plain colour or transparent, with padding and a shadow (Settings → Capture). For anything else, Quick Actions → Make Mockup… (or Tools → Mockup from Files…) opens the Mockup studio: gradients, 3D tilt, a tinted shadow, macOS and browser window frames, iPhone and MacBook frames, a caption line, and store-ready export sizes for the Mac App Store, App Store, Google Play, Product Hunt, Open Graph and more.

Yes - Quick Actions → Pin Last Capture turns the latest capture into a small always-on-top floating window. Perfect for keeping a reference, a design mock or an error message visible while you work in another app.

That’s the Quick Access overlay (enable it in Settings → Quick Access): after each capture a thumbnail card appears in a screen corner. From it you can drag the image straight into another app (Slack, mail, a document), open the editor, copy, or dismiss. You choose the corner, the thumbnail size and whether cards auto-dismiss after a few seconds.

While you drag an area selection, ShotBrew shows a crosshair, a live W×H size label and an optional magnifier loupe for pixel-perfect edges. Set a corner radius in Settings → Capture → Selection Appearance and your screenshots come out with rounded corners.

Press ⌃⌥V or open the menu → Record and choose:

• Record Area… - a rectangle you select.
• Record App… - a single application.
• Record Fullscreen… - the whole screen.
• Record GIF - records straight to an animated GIF.

An optional 3-2-1 countdown gives you time to get ready; press ⌃⌥V again to stop. After recording, an actions panel offers to edit, save or share the video.

Use Record App… - ShotBrew records that application's windows only. Notifications, other windows and your desktop never appear in the frame, even if they are on top of the app while you record.

In cinematic mode ShotBrew automatically zooms in on your clicks after the recording, with smooth camera-like motion, cursor spotlight and click ripples - the polished "product demo" look, with no manual keyframing. You can also direct it live: Zoom at Cursor (⌃⌥Z) adds a zoom point where the pointer is, Permanent Zoom (⌃⌥X) holds it until you press again. And in the editor, Auto Zoom from Clicks turns the recorded clicks into zoom keyframes you can move or delete before exporting.

Yes - a cursor spotlight keeps the pointer easy to follow and click ripples mark every click, so viewers always see where the action is. Combined with automatic zoom this is what makes tutorials look professionally produced.

Enable the microphone for recording and pick your input device in Settings → Recording. The first recording with audio asks for the macOS Microphone permission. You can also add narration later - the video editor records voiceover takes over the finished video while it plays back muted - and clean the voice up afterwards with Studio Mic, which removes keyboard, fan and room noise in one click.

Yes. In the recording setup choose the Audio source: System, Microphone, Both or None. System sound is captured natively through Apple's ScreenCaptureKit - no virtual audio driver (BlackHole, Soundflower or similar) to install, and no extra permission beyond Screen Recording. Note: GIF recordings are always silent - the format has no audio.

Yes - set Audio source to Both: the microphone and the Mac's own sound are recorded together. Great for tutorials where you narrate over an app that plays audio, or for capturing a call with your commentary. Pick the microphone in the same panel.

Yes - enable the 3-2-1 countdown in the recording settings. After you hit record, ShotBrew counts down on screen so you can switch to the right window, position the cursor and start clean.

No - press Rewind (⌃⌥R, or ⏪ on the recording panel). The last five seconds are dropped, a short 3-2-1 countdown gives you a beat, and the recording continues in the same take; press it twice to go back ten seconds. The removed span is cut cleanly from the file when you stop, so the result never shows the stumble.

Not if the Retro Buffer was running. More Recording → Start Retro Buffer keeps the last 30, 60 or 120 seconds of your screen in a private temporary folder; when something worth keeping happens, press ⌃⌥B (Save the Last Seconds) and it becomes a ready file. The buffer is off by default, records at 1080p/30 - evidence for a bug report, not a master - and deletes everything when you stop it or quit.

Yes - More Recording → Teleprompter… opens a floating script panel that is excluded from the capture, so viewers never see it. Set the speed in words per minute and the text size; scrolling starts and pauses together with the recording (Rewind included), and a shortcut starts or pauses it from anywhere. A mirror mode is there for teleprompter glass.

Yes - press ⌃⌥D (or ✏️ on the recording panel) for Draw on Screen: pen, line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, highlighter, numbered stamps and text, in six colours. Strokes can vanish after a moment, fade like a laser pointer or stay until you clear them; hold ⌃⌥ and drag for a quick stroke without entering the mode. The drawings are part of the recording on purpose - the palette itself is not.

1. Open the recording in the editor (from the actions panel after recording).
2. Press S (Split) at the playhead to create cut points, or set the In/Out selection with I and O.
3. Press ⌫ (Delete Selection) to remove the selected piece - the timeline collapses instantly - or Keep Only to keep just the selection.
4. ⌘Z undoes any step. Export with ⌘S (overwrite) or ⇧⌘S (save as a new file).

In the editor open the Text tab and click Auto Captions. Speech is transcribed on your Mac (nothing is uploaded) and the words land on the caption track as editable, styled captions - TikTok-style presets, fonts, animations and karaoke word highlighting included. You can also import an existing .srt file or export the transcript to .srt/.txt.

Two tools in the editor do this:

• Cut Silence - detects pauses in the audio waveform and removes them from the video in one click.
• Edit by Transcript - shows your speech as text; select words and press ⌫ to cut them from the video. Detected filler words ("um", "uh"…) are highlighted and can be removed all at once.

In the Audio tab: Add Audio… places a music file on its own timeline lane (drag to move, trim the edges, split, set volume), and Record Voiceover records narration from the playhead while the video plays. Enable Duck music to automatically lower the music under your speech, and Normalize to bring quiet voice up to a standard level.

Yes - Add Video… appends more video files to the end of the timeline. Clips of a different size are letterboxed onto the main canvas automatically, transitions work at every cut, and captions, silence removal and the transcript understand the added clips too.

Text tab → Add Text places a caption at the playhead. Drag it anywhere on the preview, double-click to edit the text in place, and pick a style preset (plate, TikTok outline, YouTube box, neon…), a font and an entrance animation - fade, slide, pop, typewriter or karaoke. Captions live on their own timeline lane, so you can move and trim them like clips.

Use Zoom keyframes: move the playhead, choose the area to zoom into on the preview, and ShotBrew glides the camera in and out smoothly between your zoom points - up to ×8. It's the same polished movement as cinematic recording, added after the fact.

Overlays tab → Add Watermark… - pick an image (PNG with transparency works best), then drag it right on the preview to any position, or snap it to a corner from the menu. Size and opacity sliders included; the watermark appears in the exported video, GIFs and frame snapshots.

Yes - Add Overlay… puts another video or image on top of the recording: a webcam reaction, a demo clip, a logo. Drag it anywhere on the preview, choose a shape (rectangle, rounded, webcam-style circle), size and timing - and animate it with keyframes if you want it to move.

• Blur/Pixelate region - draw a rectangle over the area and set the time range it should cover. Regions are anchored to the source footage, so cuts, speed changes and crops never move them off the data.
• Blur Faces (Effects tab) - finds every face in the recording on-device and follows it with a soft blur or pixelation, even when the person moves.
• Background behind a person (Effects tab) - on-device Vision segmentation keeps you sharp and blurs or replaces everything behind you, like a portrait mode for recordings with a camera.

Video blur is cosmetic obfuscation: for a secret that must stay secret, cut the span or re-record it.

Select a segment and use the Speed menu (×0.25 to ×4, pitch-corrected) or Freeze (1–5 s still frame - great for callouts). Speed changes show as an orange badge on the timeline; everything is undoable.

Open the Frame tab and pick the 9:16 aspect (or 1:1, 4:3, 16:9). The canvas extends with a gradient or color background - your recording is never distorted - and you can add padding, rounded corners and a shadow for the Screen-Studio look before exporting.

Because music or captions run longer than the footage - like in CapCut, the project simply continues on a black screen until the last clip ends, and the exported video includes that tail. Trim the music clip's right edge back to the video's end if you don't want the black outro.

MP4 with H.264 or HEVC at original, 4K, 1080p or 720p resolution; when nothing needs re-encoding ShotBrew uses a fast lossless passthrough. You can also export a frame as PNG or a selection as GIF, and put the video on a gradient frame with rounded corners and a shadow before exporting.

Two ways: Record GIF captures straight to an animated GIF, or - in the video editor - select the exact range with In/Out and use Export selection as GIF. The editor's effects (zoom, blur, captions, watermark) are baked into the GIF.

• Zoom the timeline from whole-video down to frame level (slider, ± buttons or pinch on the trackpad) - a time ruler adapts its scale.
• Step frame by frame with ←/→; the audio waveform under the filmstrip shows exactly where speech, pauses and clicks are.
• Press S to split at the playhead. For a bigger view, edit fullscreen (⌃⌘F or the ⤴ button; Esc exits).

Yes - pick a style and duration and it plays at every segment boundary (make cuts with Split first): Dip to Black, Flash White, Crossfade, Slide, Push and Wipe. Everything previews live; the overlap styles render the true two-stream blend on export, slightly shortening the video.

Yes - Detach Audio turns the recording’s own sound into regular audio clips on the timeline: move, trim, split and re-volume them independently, like added music. Re-attach puts the sound back into the video whenever you want.

Yes - the Audio tab has one-click FX presets for the recording’s sound: Voice Boost (cuts rumble, adds clarity), Bass Boost, Brighten, Telephone, Small Room / Large Hall reverb and Echo. They play live in the preview and are baked into the export; background music stays clean.

Yes - Studio Mic in the Audio tab. One click runs Apple's on-device sound isolation to remove keyboard clatter, fans and room noise, then a dynamics stage that evens out the dialogue. Preview and export are identical, nothing is uploaded, and the original recording is untouched - switch it off to compare.

Yes - the Crop tool: draw the area to keep right on the preview and the output frame shrinks to it. Crop combines with zoom, blur regions and captions, and you can re-crop to go tighter.

Yes - style one caption (preset, font, size, color, animation), then use the ★ menu → Save Current Style…. Saved presets apply to a single caption or to all captions at once - handy right after Auto Captions.

Yes - the ⓘ button on the timeline opens an info panel with the file’s details (size, duration, resolution, fps, codec, bitrate, color profile, even where it was downloaded from) and editable Finder tags - changes land on the file immediately and are searchable in Finder and Spotlight.

Yes - Tools → Step Guide from Recording… (or the Guide button in the editor). ShotBrew finds every click in the recording, grabs the frame around it, crops to the click and writes a caption from the clicked element ("Click Save") that you can edit. Export as Markdown, HTML or PDF - or as an interactive demo: one self-contained HTML file where each click reveals the next screen. Blur regions and Blur Faces from the editor are applied to the step screenshots.

Use the Color Picker from the menu - a magnified loupe follows the cursor for pixel-perfect picking, and the color is copied as a hex value ready to paste into your code or design tool.

The Screen Ruler overlays a resizable ruler on the screen with units in px, pt, % or mm - handy for checking layouts, spacing and sizes in any app without opening a design tool.

Yes - the built-in contrast checker rates a foreground/background pair against WCAG and the newer APCA guidelines, so you can verify text readability right on the live screen.

Yes - capture the code and ShotBrew decodes QR codes and barcodes on-device, copying the content (a link, a Wi-Fi config, a serial number) to the clipboard. No camera and no phone needed.

Yes - the Print Layout tool arranges captures on a page and sends them to the printer or exports a PDF, with sensible margins and scaling handled for you.

Share is in the editor, in the Mockup tool, in History and under Quick Actions → Share Last…. It offers AirDrop, Mail and Messages as first-class rows plus the macOS share sheet with every share extension you have installed. Nothing goes through our servers - the file is handed straight to the app you pick.

No. ShotBrew costs $19.99 once - a lifetime license with updates included. No subscription, no recurring charges.

Yes, and it is read by the person who writes the code - ShotBrew is built by one developer. Email support [at] shotbrew [dot] app from your purchase email. License holders' requests are the ones that shape the roadmap, and when your idea ships, the release notes name the person who asked for it.

We won't promise every request. What gets built is what fits the app: native, fully on-device, no subscription, no telemetry, no account. So a smarter capture mode, a new export preset or an editor tool is exactly the kind of thing that lands in the next release - often within weeks. Cloud upload links, a team dashboard, an AI feature that ships your screen to someone's server, or anything needing a new system permission is what we say no to, and that refusal is the product, not a limitation.

Yes. Email support [at] shotbrew [dot] app within 14 days of your purchase and we refund it - no questions asked, no form to fill in. The 7-day trial unlocks every feature precisely so that you never have to buy blind (see Terms §8).

ShotBrew is currently sold outside the EU/EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland - licenses are not offered to residents of those territories at this time. The free trial is available everywhere. We hope to expand availability in the future.

The trial lasts 7 days with every feature unlocked and requires no credit card. When it ends, buy a license to keep going - your settings and captures stay put.

ShotBrew locks its capture shortcuts and asks you to activate - nothing is deleted. Your captures, recordings, edits and settings stay on your Mac, and the moment your license is linked you pick up exactly where you left off.

There is no license key to type in - a license is linked to your Mac instead. Open shotbrew.app/activate, enter the email you paid with and your Machine ID (in ShotBrew: menu bar icon → Settings → About → Manage License → Copy Machine ID), then submit.

Submitting the form immediately adds 3 days to this Mac, so ShotBrew keeps working while we link your lifetime license - usually within a few hours, always within 24. When our confirmation email arrives, press Check Again in Manage License and you're done.

One license covers one Mac. You can re-assign it to a different Mac up to once per year - upgrading your machine is never a problem.

Install ShotBrew on the new Mac, open Settings → About → Manage License and press Copy Machine ID - then email that Machine ID to support [at] shotbrew [dot] app from your purchase email. We re-link the license to the new Mac; it can move once per year. If activation reports the limit was reached, email us anyway and we'll sort it out.

ShotBrew checks for updates itself and offers to install them in-app - no re-downloading from the site. Updates are free for license holders.

macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, native on both Apple Silicon and Intel. Built on Apple's modern ScreenCaptureKit, AVFoundation and Vision frameworks - no Electron.

1. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording.
2. If ShotBrew is listed but off - turn it on. If it's on but capture still fails, toggle it off and on again.
3. Quit and relaunch ShotBrew (macOS applies this permission on launch).

1. Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone - ShotBrew must be allowed.
2. In Settings → Recording make sure the right microphone is selected and audio recording is enabled.
3. External mics: confirm the device works in another app first.

ShotBrew's default capture shortcuts are ⌃⌥3, ⌃⌥4 and ⌃⌥5 - chosen so they don't collide with the macOS screenshot tool, so out of the box nothing conflicts. If you assigned ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4 or ⌘⇧5 yourself, the system wins while its own screenshot shortcuts are enabled: pick a different combo in Settings → Shortcuts, or free the system ones in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screenshots. A combo can also be held by another app's global shortcut - try a different one to confirm.

macOS hides menu bar icons when the bar runs out of space (especially on notched MacBooks). Close some other menu bar apps or ⌘-drag icons to reorder them; ShotBrew is still running - its shortcuts keep working even while the icon is hidden.

Scroll slowly and steadily, in one direction, and avoid pages with animations, parallax or sticky video while capturing - moving pixels confuse the stitcher. For stubborn pages, take area shots section by section and combine them with Add Capture (stitch below).

On-device speech recognition needs the language's dictation model. Enable your language in System Settings → Keyboard → Dictation, let macOS download the model, then run Auto Captions again. ShotBrew never falls back to cloud recognition - your audio stays on the Mac.

ShotBrew is notarized by Apple, so a healthy download opens without warnings. If you still see one, the download was likely interrupted - delete the app and download it again from shotbrew.app. As a fallback, right-click the app in Applications and choose Open once.

Update ShotBrew and re-export. Current versions tag video files with the same color profile as Apple’s built-in recorder (HD 1-13-1), so players decode the brightness correctly; files exported by old versions can be fixed by re-exporting.