Everything Wacdum does
Wacdum is a screenshot and screen recording app for macOS. It sits in the menu bar, and most of the time you use it without opening a window: press a shortcut, drag a box, and the link is on your clipboard. Below are all 72 things it can do, grouped by the job you are trying to get done.
Ways to capture
Five capture modes, each with its own shortcut, plus a mode that lets you decide after you have framed the shot. Nothing here needs a window open first.
Whole screen
Every display at once, each saved as its own image so a two monitor setup does not become one very wide file.
A single window
Hover to highlight, click to take. Window shadows are off by default because a tight edge is sharper and smaller, and there is a switch if you want the shadow back.
Any region you drag
Drag a box, or nudge the edges with the handles first. The last area is remembered so the next shot can reuse it exactly.
The same area again
Re-shoots the last region with no picker at all. The one to reach for when you are documenting the same window over and over.
All-in-One
Frame once, then pick from eight things on a floating bar: still, whole screen, a window, scrolling, timer, text recognition, video or GIF. It reopens on the area you last used.
Scrolling capture
Follows an area while the page moves and stitches what is revealed into one tall image. It reads vertical and horizontal scrolling, and can drive the scroll itself if you let it.
A countdown before the shot
Five or ten seconds, for menus and hover states that vanish the moment you touch anything else. The countdown is on screen and cancellable.
Frozen screen while you choose
Freezes what is on screen the instant you start selecting, so an animation or a tooltip cannot move while you are still dragging the box.
A magnifier in the picker
A loupe follows the crosshair so you can land on the exact pixel rather than close to it.
A tidy desktop, only in the capture
Hides desktop icons for the shot and puts them straight back. You choose what shows instead: your wallpaper, a picture of your own, or a plain colour.
It can take over the macOS screenshot keys
macOS holds Shift Command 3, 4 and 5 for itself. One button frees all five and hands them to the matching Wacdum command, and the same button gives them back.
It picks up the system screenshots too
Take a shot with the macOS keys and Wacdum can adopt it into the same flow, either onto the capture card or straight up to the cloud. Your original file is never touched.
The editor
Seventeen tools, each on a single key, so marking something up is a few keystrokes rather than a trip around a toolbar. Everything below is one editor, opened straight from the capture.
Arrows, lines and shapes
Arrow, curved arrow, line, rectangle and ellipse. Arrows come in four styles including curved and double ended, and the curved ones have a bend you can drag.
Freehand drawing and an eraser
Draw with the pen at any of four weights, and rub out with an eraser that reuses the same size control as a brush.
Text in seven typefaces
Inter, Geist, Montserrat, Space Grotesk, DM Sans, Plus Jakarta Sans and IBM Plex Sans, all bundled with the app so what you pick is exactly what renders. Twelve sizes from 16 to 288.
Step numbers, four ways
Number the steps as 1, 2, 3, as A, B, C, as I, II, III, or as a, b, c, and start the count wherever you need it.
Blur, pixelate and black out
Two ways to hide something sensitive, each with an intensity slider so you can go from a soft blur to unreadable.
Highlight, spotlight and magnify
Highlight like a marker pen, dim everything except one area with the spotlight, or drop a loupe on the page that enlarges what is under it. The loupe can be round or rectangular.
Crop to thirteen ratios
Freeform plus twelve fixed ratios, from 1:1 and 16:9 through to 2.35:1 cinema and 9:16 vertical, with edge snapping and a live zoom readout.
Combine several captures into one
Insert an image from disk or paste one from the clipboard, then arrange them on the same canvas. Useful for a before and after in a single file.
Ten colours and any other one
A ten colour palette sized for annotation, plus the full system colour picker when you need an exact brand colour. The highlighter drops white, because a white highlight is invisible.
Backgrounds behind the capture
Seven presets, or build your own from a solid colour, a two stop gradient, your live wallpaper or your own picture. Padding, corner radius, drop shadow, five alignments and six output ratios.
Undo, redo and one key per tool
Every tool has a single letter shortcut, V for select through to E for erase, and the whole history is undoable.
Three ways out
Copy to the clipboard, save to a folder, or upload and get a link, chosen when you are done rather than before you start.
Screen recording
The same framing tools, recording instead of shooting. Twelve options decide what ends up in the file, and the controls stay out of the recording itself.
Whole screen or one region
Record everything or just the part that matters, with the recorded area outlined and everything outside it dimmed.
Your voice and the computer's audio
Pick any microphone, capture what the Mac itself is playing, or both. There is a mono option for when a single voice does not need two channels.
Camera in the corner
A live camera bubble in circle, square or 16:9, which you can drag and resize before you start and which is composited into the finished video.
Frame rate and resolution you control
Up to 60 frames a second or matched to your display, H.264 or HEVC, and a ceiling on resolution from 4K down to SD so a long recording stays a sensible size.
Showing what you did, not just what changed
Mouse clicks can be highlighted as they happen and keystrokes shown on screen, which is what turns a silent recording into something followable.
A countdown, a frame and a dimmed background
A countdown before it starts, an outline around the area while it runs, and the rest of the screen dimmed. Each one is a switch.
Pause, resume, restart, discard
A controls bar with all four, so a stumble halfway through does not mean starting the whole thing again.
Trim it before it goes anywhere
A trim editor opens on the finished recording so the dead air at each end never reaches whoever you are sending it to.
It survives a crash
Recordings are written as they go, so an interrupted session leaves a usable file rather than nothing at all.
GIFs
A separate recorder, because a GIF for a pull request has different needs from a video for a customer.
Made for pasting into an issue or a chat
Records straight to an animated GIF with no conversion step, at a frame rate and duration ceiling you set.
Sized how you need it
Width presets with the height following the source, three quality levels, and an optimiser that drops identical frames so a static moment costs nothing.
Trim by frame
A GIF editor for picking the exact frame range, since a GIF that starts one beat late reads as broken.
Copying text off the screen
Text recognition runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded to read it, and it works on anything on screen whether or not the app it came from allows selection.
Text recognition on any region
Drag a box over an error message, a scanned page or a video frame and the text lands on your clipboard, with a window open so you can check it first.
Your language, and links kept
Recognition uses whichever languages your macOS version supports, links are detected as links, and line breaks can be kept or reflowed into a paragraph.
It reads a file too
Point it at an image you already have rather than at the screen, which is the quickest way to get text out of a screenshot somebody sent you.
Keeping something in view
Sometimes the point of a capture is to look at it while you work on something else.
Pin a capture on top of everything
Floats above every window, drag it anywhere, resize from the corner with the ratio locked, scroll to scale, and press Escape when you are done.
It never appears in your next capture
A pinned capture is excluded from screen capture at the window server, so a screenshot of a screenshot cannot happen by accident.
The capture card
Each capture lands in a small card you can copy, save, upload, annotate or throw away. Position, size, auto close, swipe to dismiss and which display it follows are all yours.
Bring back one you closed
Restore Last Closed Card is in the menu bar, because dismissing a capture by mistake is a moment of mild panic and the fix should not be three clicks deep.
Capture history
Every capture this Mac has taken, for as long as you choose to keep them. Reopen, pin, annotate, save a copy or clear the lot.
Where your captures end up
Five rules for what happens after a capture, and ten places a file can go. Set it once and stop thinking about it.
A link on your clipboard
Choose Cloud and the capture uploads the moment you take it. The link is copied before the upload has even finished.
Straight to the clipboard as an image
For pasting into a chat or a document without a file existing at all. Any shortcut can be given a Control modified twin that forces this.
A file on your Mac
Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures or a folder of your own, and optionally handed straight to Mail, Messages or Preview.
Both at once
Upload and keep a local copy in the same action, for when the link is for someone else and the file is for you.
Four image formats
PNG, JPEG, HEIC and TIFF, with quality where the format has it.
HDR when your display has it
Captures the extended range on a display that produces it, and writes a tone mapped copy for everything that cannot show it.
Retina details you can set
Keep the full pixel density or scale to 1x, add an @2x suffix, convert to sRGB, add a border, and name files the way you want.
It tells you when the cloud cannot take it
Not signed in, no plan, out of space, a payment that failed or simply no internet each get their own message and the button that fixes it, and the capture is saved to your folder.
Automation
Fourteen global shortcuts and twenty two URL commands, so Wacdum fits whatever already drives your Mac.
Fourteen shortcuts, all yours to change
Every capture mode, recording, GIF, scrolling, text recognition and stop recording, each rebindable. The field shows your modifiers as you hold them so you can see it listening.
A URL for every command
Twenty two commands driven by opening a URL, which means Shortcuts, Raycast, Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Stream Deck, Automator or a shell script can all run them.
Scripted captures decide their own ending
Every capture command takes copy, save, annotate, upload or pin, so a script can choose the outcome without changing your settings.
Exact coordinates
Give x, y, width, height and a display and the capture happens with no picker at all. Coordinates can be measured from the top or the bottom of the screen.
The app itself
A native Mac app in the menu bar, with eighty one settings behind it for the parts you want different.
One app for Apple Silicon and Intel
A universal build, so it runs natively either way. macOS 14 or later.
Signed and notarised by Apple
It opens without warnings, and every update is verified against a signing key before it is installed.
It updates itself
Checks quietly in the background, and you can turn that off. Release notes are the same ones published on this site.
Nine tabs of settings
General, Wallpaper, Shortcuts, Quick Access, Recording, Screenshots, Cloud, Advanced and About, with eighty one settings between them.
Small comforts
Launch at login, a shutter sound you can mute, the recording time in the menu bar, and the cloud telling you plainly when something is wrong.
What it costs
Capturing, editing, recording and saving to your own Mac are in the app. A plan is what puts your captures in the cloud and gives you links to share. Lite is $4.99 a month with 1 gb storage, Pro is $8.99 a month with 100 gb storage, Max is $19.99 a month with unlimited storage. Paying yearly takes 20 percent off.