Long story short, I done goofed: A bug snuck into my trial time code and ended it early for some users. If you experienced this, please feel free to re-download the trial from the website (direct download here) for another, full 28-day trial. My apologies for the inconvenience!
Upsies is something I wrote on a whim, just out of curiosity if it worked – using the MetalFX Spatial Upscaler to upscale photos and images. And lo and behold, it does work, and produces arguably nicer results than, say, resizing an image up with Preview.app.
It’s a freeware app, available for download on the Mac App Store(with optional tipping). It requires macOS 14 Sonoma, and a MetalFX Spatial Upscaler-capable Mac.
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.
ScreenFloat’s iCloud Sync settings
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
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
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!
