This week's tip of the week is Snapzy.
I’m a daily CleanShot X user, so I was curious how much friction I’d hit by switching to Snapzy. For the past week, I’ve purposely stopped using CleanShot X and used Snapzy instead. Honestly, I haven’t noticed much of a difference for my day-to-day workflow. Pretty sweet tbh.
Snapzy has a solid feature set: area capture, fullscreen capture, scrolling capture, OCR, screen recording, annotation, keyboard shortcuts, capture history, and cloud uploads. The big difference is that Snapzy is open source, and for cloud uploads, you can bring your own S3 or Cloudflare R2 bucket instead of using someone else’s screenshot cloud.
Install it with Homebrew or download it from snapzy.app:
brew tap duongductrong/snapzy https://github.com/duongductrong/Snapzy
brew install --cask snapzyOne caveat: Snapzy is not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS may block it the first time you try to open it.
The project currently recommends removing the quarantine attribute manually:
sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Snapzy.appThat removes macOS’s downloaded-app quarantine flag, so only run it if you’re comfortable trusting the app. As always, use your own judgment when running apps that are not notarized. It’s open source, so you can inspect the code or build it yourself if you want the extra peace of mind.
Once it’s running, you get shortcuts like CleanShot X. It’s not one-to-one with CleanShot X, but it’s pretty close.
Snapzy and CleanShot X context menus showcasing their features
Snapzy also has a snapzy:// URL scheme, which is a nice little nerd bonus:
snapzy://capture/area
snapzy://capture/scrolling
snapzy://capture/ocr
snapzy://record/screen
snapzy://open/historyThat means you can wire screenshots, OCR, recordings, and history into Raycast, Alfred, Hammerspoon, shell scripts, or whatever other automation you use in your workflow.
If you’re already happy with CleanShot X, I wouldn’t call this a must-switch. But after purposely using Snapzy instead for a week, I can say it holds up surprisingly well. I’m going to keep using it and who knows? The only thing I really miss is exporting recordings as animated GIFs. Aside from that, it’s super solid. That said, FFmpeg covers that shortcoming. Looks like the version I just upgraded to has animated GIF support now.
If you want a very capable, free, open-source screenshot workflow for macOS, Snapzy is definitely worth a look.
That's it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!
