Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.
ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs. Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.
ScreenFloat makes it easy to automate taking (timed) screenshots and capturing video recordings with Siri Shortcuts; and its widgets give you quick access to all your shots, folders, tags and picked colors, system-wide.
To integrate capturing your screen into a Shortcut, ScreenFloat comes with a couple of useful Shortcuts to help you do that.
Here are ScreenFloat’s shortcuts available to you:
Capture Shot Allows you to automate capturing a (timed) screenshot or screen recording, with the options to float it, give it a title, tags and notes, and add it to a folder. You can choose to re-capture the last, previously captured area of your screen, or do capture a new one.
Import Files Import specific image or video files into ScreenFloat, with the same options as Capture Shot.
Hide / Unhide Floating Shots, Close All Floating Shots A way to manage your floating shots’ visibility.
Widgets
ScreenFloat offers you a number of widgets, ranging from quick access to capturing your screen and managing your floating shots, over quickly accessing your shots, to folders and picked colors.
Command and Control
These widgets allow you to control all aspects of ScreenFloat – capture new shots and recordings, manage your floating shots and open the Shots- and Tags Browser. These might be especially useful placed on your Desktop, if you’re on macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.
Quick Access to Shots
With “Shot”-family of widgets, you get quick access to: – Favorite Shots – Recently Captured Shots – Shots in a specific folder – Recently closed floating shots – Shots tagged with a specific tag
Clicking a shot will reveal it in the Shots Browser.
Tags and Colors
And lastly, you can have quick access to your favorite tags, and recently picked colors. Clicking a tag in the Favorite Tags widget will reveal it in the Tags Browser. The color widget allows you to copy a color’s hex-, rgb-, float- or hsl values, or a sample color image.
That’s a Wrap
Well, you’re all caught up on what’s new and possible with ScreenFloat 2 now. Thank you for seeing it through, I hope it’s been informative and useful for you.
Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.
ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs. Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.
ScreenFloat synchronizes your Shots, folders, tags and metadata over iCloud, so your library is available on every Mac you use it on. The Tags Browser gives you a nice overview over all your tags and allows you to rename, merge, favorite and delete them. And with Spotlight, you can find your shots system-wide.
Have your ScreenFloat library with you everywhere, by syncing everything using your iCloud account.
If you choose to use iCloud sync, ScreenFloat synchronizes all your shots by default. But you can fine-tune it to your liking. You can specify whether to synchronize all shots, image shots only, or video shots only. Additionally, you can set a file size limit to make ScreenFloat only synchronize shots that have a file size smaller than the limit you set.
Limits only apply to shots going up to iCloud, not coming down from iCloud: If you have a file size limit set to 2 MB, images and videos larger than that will not sync up, but shots in iCloud larger than that will sync down to your Mac. Or, if you choose on one Mac to only synchronize image shots, it means video shots will not be synced up from that Mac to iCloud, but they will sync down from iCloud. Once a shot has been synced, it is no longer subject to these limits. Basically, if you start synchronizing with no restrictions, and later change your mind to only sync image shots and no video shots, video shots already synced up to iCloud will continue to sync changes and will not be deleted from iCloud unless you manually delete the shot.
Shots that are not normally synced because of a limit you have set up can be force-synced in the Shots Browser by right-clicking them:
You can manually start a sync in the Shots Browser, by clicking the little refresh button at the far right of the status bar:
Refresh iCloud Sync manually in the Shots Browser
Refresh iCloud Sync manually in the Shots Browser
Refresh iCloud Sync manually in the Shots Browser
This is also where you’ll be informed about any errors that might occur, in addition to the Settings’ iCloud panel.
What gets synchronized in detail: – Your shots, their annotations, and metadata (title, notes, detected text/faces/barcodes, etc) – Your tags and their metadata (favorite status) – Your folders and smart folders – Minimal information about the devices you synchronize, to enable filtering by device in smart folders and search.
You can read my Privacy Policy here. The gist: I see nothing, and I want to see nothing. Whenever any of my apps use your internet connection, it’s to realize a feature in the app, not to send me any usage data, tracking data or anything else like that.
The Tags Browser
Using ScreenFloat 1, I always longed for a way to see all my tags and to organize them more precisely. That’s why in ScreenFloat 2, there’s the Tags Browser, which lets you (and me) do exactly that.
You can rename tags, in case you discover a typo. You can merge tags, if you’ve accidentally created similar ones. Shots will automatically update to the merged-into tag. You can delete tags, if you no longer need them. They will be removed from all shots they were assigned to. You can favorite tags which will help in discovering in the tag menus, or when auto-completing tags in the Shots Browser’s Info panel.
It’s also neat to be able to Reveal Shots tagged with one or more selected tags right from the Tags Browser in the Shots Browser.
It shows you the number of shots tagged with each tag, which helps weed out shots and tags you might no longer need.
Spotlight
ScreenFloat optionally indexes your shots and their metadata with Spotlight, so you can find them system-wide.
ScreenFloat Shot search results in Spotlight
ScreenFloat Shot search results in Spotlight
ScreenFloat Shot search results in Spotlight
The neat thing about this is that it not only allows you to search by shots’ metadata (title, notes, tags), but also their detected text/barcode content, as well as any text annotations you have made.
Selecting a search result reveals it in your Shots Browser, where a double-click onto it, or the enter/return key on your keyboard will float it right away if you like.
Up Next
The next and last part of this series – Part VIII: Shortcuts and Widgets – takes a detailed look at ScreenFloat’s Shortcuts integration, and the widgets it offers. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!
Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.
ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs. Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.
From time to time, you’ll find yourself doing something over and over again, like resize an image before you send it in an email, or crop an image before you annotate it, or duplicate a screen recording before you remove its audio tracks. ScreenFloat speeds that up by providing customizable double-click workflows for your floating shots.
Double-Click workflows are set up in ScreenFloat’s settings. You can reach them by clicking on ScreenFloat’s menu bar icon in the right portion of your menu bar; or by right-clicking any floating shot; or by pressing command (⌘) – , in the Shots Browser. Select Floating Shots, and you’ll be ready to get going:
Double-click workflows are based on your keyboard’s modifier keys (command (⌘), option (⌥), control (^), shift (⇧) and fn). You can set up workflows for when no modifier key is pressed (a simple double-click onto the floating shot), or when any combination of those modifier keys is pressed (i.e., command-double-click, command-shift-double-click a floating shot). This allows you to set up not just one, but multiple double-click workflows, tailored to different situations or requirements.
To add a double-click action to a workflow, hold down the modifier keys of your choice (or none) and press the + button at the bottom left of the list. To make changing workflows with modifier keys easier, you can press the lock button at the bottom of the list to “lock in” the currently pressed modifier keys. Now you can let them go and still edit the workflow for that set of keys. Press the lock again to unlock the keys.
Switching through my double-click workflows by pressing different modifier keys on my keyboard.
The – button allows you to remove selected actions from the current workflow, remove all actions from the current workflow, or completely reset all your double-click workflows.
Available Actions
Actions in a workflow are performed in the order they appear in the list when you add them. This order is more or less pre-defined and cannot be changed: for instance, the Duplicate Shot action is always added to the top of the list, and thus, performed first when the double-click workflow runs. On the other hand, Copy as File is performed last, so you can have a double-click workflow where you crop, resize and annotate a shot, and after that, that newly edited shot is copied.
Here, we set up a workflow that, when we double-click a shot with the fn-option-command modifier keys pressed, will duplicate the shot first, then allow for cropping and annotation, then copies the resulting new image file.
Here, we set up a workflow that, when we double-click a shot with the fn-option-command modifier keys pressed, will duplicate the shot first, then allow for cropping and annotation, then copies the resulting new image file.
Here, we set up a workflow that, when we double-click a shot with the fn-option-command modifier keys pressed, will duplicate the shot first, then allow for cropping and annotation, then copies the resulting new image file.
Let’s go over the list of available actions.
Some of these actions are only available when image shots are double-clicked: – Lower image resolution – Annotate Shot while others are only available for screen recordings: – Copy Still Image from Video – Trim Video – Remove Audio
Let’s go over some that might need further explanation:
Copy Clicked Text (Additive) When you double-click a text line in a shot with this active, that text line gets copied. Double-click another in the same shot, and it gets added to the previous copy.
Copy Still Image from Video Copies the currently displayed frame in a floating video shot.
Open Copy With Allows you to specify two apps: one for image shots, and one for video shots.
Export to Folder Lets you select a folder on your disk to save the double-clicked shot to in its native PNG format right away.
Resize Shot Allows you to specify a percentage to resize to (25%, 50%, 75%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200%), or to resize it manually.
Rotate Rotate the shot clockwise, or counterclockwise.
Rate Shot Specify a rating to give the shot when double-clicking it (from no rating to 1-5 stars).
Add to Folder Specify a folder the shot should be added to, or let the double-click show the folders menu so you can select one on the fly.
Add Tag Specify a tag to tag the double-clicked shot with, or show the Tags menu to select one on the fly.
Toggle Opacity Between 100% and Select an opacity level all the way down to 40% to toggle between with a double-click.
Toggle Visibility Between Everywhere and Select “Current Space” or “Currently Active App” as an option. Double-click to set it to, say, Currently Active App, then double-click it again to toggle it back to Everywhere.
Some actions are mutually exclusive. For instance, you can’t have both Copy All Detected Text and Copy Clicked Text in one and the same action, because one would override the other, and only the last operation would “take”.
Running a double-click workflow on a floating image shot that automatically reduces the shot’s resolution to 72 dpi, then asks me to resize it, then to crop/fold it, and then shows the Share menu.
Up Next
The next part of this series – Part VII: iCloud Sync, Tags Browser, Spotlight – takes a detailed look at ScreenFloat’s iCloud sync, the Tags Browser, and system-wide Spotlight search. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!
Let’s take a tour through ScreenFloat and see how it can power up your screenshots, too.
ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots by allowing you to take screenshots and recordings that float above everything else, keeping certain information always in sight. Its Shots Browser stores your shots and helps you organize, name, tag, rate, favorite and find them. Everything syncs across your Macs. Extract, view and copy detected text, faces and barcodes. Edit, annotate, markup and redact your shots effortlessly and non-destructively. Pick colors any time. And more.
At some point, you will want to crop, resize, rotate or annotate your shots. Perhaps you might want to trim your videos, or remove their audio tracks. Read on to learn how ScreenFloat makes this easy and pain-free for you.
Right-click any floating shot or shot in the Shots Browser to edit it. By the way, in ScreenFloat 2, you can now duplicate shots, in case you just want to test a crop or rotation, or want to remove audio tracks from a screen recording but still want it around for later.
Crop
Cropping allows you to cut out a certain portion of your screenshot or recording. At the top left, you’ll see the dimensions of your selection, and the current zoom level.
Snap to edges can help you crop at just the right edge of a window, for example. Hold down the command (⌘) key to temporarily disable snapping while changing the selection rectangle.
While changing the selection rectangle, hold down the option (⌥) key to change its size around its center point. Click and drag the area of your selection rectangle to move it around.
You can also adjust the rectangle with your keyboard’s arrow keys: – Up, down, left, right moves the rectangle up, down, left, right by 1px. Hold down the shift (⇧) key to increase it to 5px. – Up, down, left, right while holding down the option key (⌥) increases or decreases the selection rectangles width or height by 1px. Hold down the shift (⇧) key to increase it to 5px.
Aspect Ratios In case you’re shooting for a specific aspect ratio, ScreenFloat has you covered for the most popular of them. Right-click the cropping area and select it.
Fold
“Folding” is a concept I came up with trying to remove unwanted parts from within screenshots of my apps’ App Store pages, like the “Also Included In” bar. By folding, you remove a vertical or horizontal middle section of an image, and stitch the remaining two parts back together, as if nothing was ever in between. Before I confuse you even more, here’s a video of it in action:
Note how, in the beginning, there is the “Ratings” bar, and the “Also Included In” bar below Yoink’s icon – both of which we don’t need in our screenshot. So we Crop the shot and select Fold Vertically, which allows me to select a vertical portion of the screenshot I want to remove along the entire width of it. We click Fold, and those two bars that were there before are now gone, and the image stitched back together. We then go in a second time and Fold Horizontally, because the screenshot is rather wide. So we select a horizontal portion along the entire height of the screenshot and click Fold to remove that as well. Voilá, our finished screenshot! And we didn’t have to manually fumble around to re-align things.
Folding is only available for image shots.
Resize and “De-Retinize”
Resizing screenshots is one of the most common things to do, so it better be quick and easy to do.
Width and height are ratio locked when you resize a shot, which means that when you enter a new width, the new height will be auto-calculated for you, and vice-versa. However, I’ve often been finding myself in Preview.app wanting to resize to exactly half, or a quarter of the current size. So in ScreenFloat, you can do that, without having to wreck your brain about what half of 180px is. You can just select 50% and it’ll do the math for you.
When you take a screenshot on a Mac’s retina display, its resolution is usually 144 dpi. It leads to a nice and clear screenshot. In some situations, however, you don’t require that high a resolution. Select Reduce resolution, and it will be reduced down to 72 dpi, leading to a smaller file size, albeit with reduced quality.
Rotate
There’s not much to say about this one – you can rotate your image- and video shots clockwise and counterclockwise. That’s… it. That’s the feature.
Trim, Remove Audio
Another one of those self-explanatory things. You can trim screen recordings’ beginnings and ends.
You can also remove a recording’s audio tracks. It is handy when you’ve recorded your microphone along with your recording for internal purposes, but you still want to send the video to someone else. Remove the audio tracks and send it. And if you duplicate the shot first, you’ll still have the original screen recording with the audio track for later. You can choose between removing all audio tracks, only the microphone track, or only the system audio track:
Annotations, Markup and Redactions
In ScreenFloat 2, you can annotate, markup and redact your screenshots.
All redactions and annotations are entirely non-destructive. That means you can always go back in and make changes to your annotations, or remove them entirely and restore the original shot.
QuickSmart Redaction Let’s begin with “QuickSmart” redaction. Right-click a text line, face or barcode and redact it without any further effort on your part. I couldn’t decide between “quick” and “smart”, so I just used both. Names are hard, but I got lucky that time.
QuickSmart-redacting a line of text, a face, and viewing the contents of a QR code.
The type of redaction (blockout, pixellate, blur) used for QuickSmart-redaction is based on what you’ve set up the redaction tool to be when manually annotating. But we’ll get to that in a bit. **
Annotate, Markup, Redact To begin, right-click a shot (floating, or in the Shots Browser) and select Annotate… .
At the top, you’ll find your tools. From left to right, they are: – Select: Select, move and manipulate one or multiple annotations space bar on your keyboard – Freedraw 1 on your keyboard – Rectangle 2 – Oval 3 – Line 4 – Arrow 5 – Star 6 – Checkmark 7 – X-Mark 8 – Text – Smart Numbered List – Highlight 9 on your keyboard – Redact 0
Double-click any of these tools (or press their number on the keyboard twice) to adjust their properties for future annotations. These are the tool’s defaults and used for every new annotation. Use the Select tool and double-click an annotation (or multiple) to change their properties. This will only affect them, and not become your new defaults.
Double-clicking a tool reveals its drawing properties.
Double-clicking a tool reveals its drawing properties.
Double-clicking a tool reveals its drawing properties.
In the screenshot above, I double-clicked the Redact tool to be able to switch between the Redaction Styles blockout, pixellate, and blur. If I choose Blockout, the Blockout Color will come into play, which will be used to completely block the part you overlay with this redaction. ** Like I said above, the Redaction Style you select here will be used for QuickSmart redaction.
The line-based tools (from freedraw to x-mark) all offer the following properties:
The tool-settings for Freedraw.
The tool-settings for Freedraw.
The tool-settings for Freedraw.
– Line Width: How thick a line to draw (1px, 3px, 6px, 9px, 12px) – Line Style: Solid, dashed and dotted. – Stroke Color: The color of the line you’re drawing, the rectangle’s bounds or circle’s outline. – Background Color: A background for the entire annotation, based on its bounding box. – Fill Color: Rectangles, Ovals, Arrows, Stars, Check- and X-Marks also offer a fill color. – Rectangle Corners: For rectangles, you can choose between sharp and rounded corners. – Arrow Style: For arrows, you can choose between “line arrow”, “shape arrow” and “back-and-forth” arrow – Check- and X-Mark Corners: Choose between sharp, rounded rect, circle or none.
Using freedraw, rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, stars, check- and x-marks.
Text Annotation You can change the font, the size, and text- and background colors.
Adding a text annotation, adjusting its text- and background color.
Smart Numbered Lists This allows you to add self-increasing numbers (or letters) to your image, for example, when writing a mail with instructions on how to perform an action on the computer, you could use this to add steps, like 1, 2, 3, and then reference them in the mail.
Using the smart numbered list tool to add “steps”. Removing one automatically updates the rest.
You can choose between numbers (1-x) or letters (A-Z, then A1, B1, … Z1, A2, B2, etc), and change their borders and colors.
Highlight You draw a highlight around an object you’d like to draw attention to, by “tuning out” the rest of the image.
The text above, highlighted with the Highlight tool.
You can change the corners of the highlight (sharp, rounded or oval), and the dimming color (all alpha values supported).
Redact Use the Redact tool to obscure something in a screenshot you don’t wish to share.
Using the Redact tool to blockout, pixellate and blur details in an image.
Please note that researchers have been able to reverse blur- and pixellate effects, so for sensitive information, please consider using blockout.
Select Use the Select tool to select existing annotations and move them around, manipulate them, or edit their properties.
Editing an already annotated image and changing its redactions, drawing a freedraw line and changing its properties, too.
As you can see above, it’s easy to go back into an already annotated shot and change or remove its annotations, and edit those annotations’ properties with a simple double-click.
Tips – Annotating supports undo and redo. Press command (⌘) – Z to undo, command (⌘) – shift (⇧) – Z to redo, or right-click to reveal the contextual menu and select it there – With the Select tool, hold down the option (⌥) key on your keyboard and click-and-drag an annotation (or multiple) to duplicate it and its properties (alternatively, select them and press command (⌘) – D) – Select all annotations easily by click-dragging with the Select tool onto the background, or by pressing command (⌘) – A on your keyboard – Delete annotations by selecting them and pressing the backspace / delete key on your keyboard – If you have an iPad and use Sidecar, you can use your Apple Pencil to make annotations, and you can switch between your current tool and the Select tool by double-tapping the Pencil. Hold down the command (⌘) key and double-tap to select the next tool, or hold down the option (⌥) key and double-tap to select the previous tool (from left to right) – Move annotations around by click-and-dragging them, or with the arrow keys on your keyboard – Remember that you can always export and drag shots to other apps with and without annotations – Annotations/markup and redactions are non-destructive – you’ll always be able to restore the original image, or go in and make changes – Change an arrow’s direction by holding down the option (⌥) key on your keyboard when you start to draw it (video – first we draw an arrow without the option key pressed, then with)
Up Next
The next part of this series – Part VI: Floating Shots’ Double-Click Workflows – takes a detailed look at everything you can do with a simple double-click onto a floating shot. Definitely take a look, there’s a lot of neat stuff there!