I’ve mentioned my annoyance about this before, but for completeness, I feel the need to complain again.įirst of all, the annotation tools in Preview aren’t available by default. This works, and Preview does have annotations, but to be honest they are pretty irritating to use. If I want to annotate my screenshot before sending, I use command-shift-4 to copy a region and have Preview open immediately ready to do my annotations. If for some reason, I do another copy before I’m ready to paste, I know the screenshot is safely waiting for me in my awesome clipboard manager Copy ‘em. If I know I’m going to just plop a screenshot into an email as-is, I’ll just use command-shift-control-4 to capture a portion of the screen to the clipboard ready to paste. I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie, so the shortcuts for the built-in Screenshot.app work really well for me. I’m sure this is useful to some, but my needs are usually ephemeral, and if not, I prefer to save my screenshots to the Finder.

Most of the screenshot apps that bring annotation capabilities along also save your images into a library. Taking a screenshot is nearly always the beginning of a process, where step two is annotating it, and only then sending the screenshot along.

I think my love of screenshot apps comes from my desire to teach and explain. I keep falling back to the tried and true, if limited built-in Screenshot.app in macOS paired with Preview for doing annotations. A new one will come into my life and then eventually fade from my favor. I’ve reviewed more of them than I can count over the years. Hi, my name is Allison, and I’m addicted to screenshot apps.

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