A free, open-source screenshot tool for macOS that blurs your secrets before you share them.
Capture, scroll-capture, record, annotate, pin and OCR. Emails, IBANs, card numbers and API keys get pixelated in one click, on-device.
Every screenshot you drop into Slack, a GitHub issue or a support ticket is a small data leak waiting to happen: a customer's email in the corner, an API key in a terminal, an IBAN on an invoice. Blurring them by hand is tedious, so people don't.
Glint finds them for you. It reads the screenshot with Apple's on-device text recognition, checks each match (IBANs and card numbers must pass their checksum, so an order number or a timestamp doesn't get blurred), and pixelates it. Each redaction is an ordinary annotation: move it, delete it, or add more.
Capture
- Area: freezes the screen first, so menus and hover states stay put. Crosshair, 8× loupe with pixel coordinates and hex color, and a live size readout in pixels.
- Window: the window on its own, even when something covers it, with its shadow and transparent corners. Press Space during an area capture to switch.
- Full screen and previous area (the same rectangle again, for before/after shots).
- Scrolling capture: select a region, scroll, press Done. Frames are stitched as you go; sticky headers, footers and floating buttons are detected so they don't repeat, and repetitive content (logs, tables, numbered lists) still lines up exactly.
- Screen recording to MP4, with one-click GIF export.
- Text (OCR): drag over anything and the text lands on your clipboard. QR codes are decoded, so you get the link rather than a picture of it.
- Self-timer (3, 5 or 10 s) for hover states and open menus.
- Color picker: press C while selecting to copy the hex color under the cursor.
- Optionally include the mouse pointer.
After capture
- Quick access overlay: a thumbnail in the corner. Drag it into any app, or hover to copy, save, annotate, pin, copy its text or redact it.
- Copies to the clipboard and saves to
~/Pictures/Glint. Both can be turned off. - Pin to screen: a floating, always-on-top copy. Drag to move, pinch to resize, scroll to fade, double-click to close.
- Annotate an image from your clipboard, a file, or a recent capture.
Annotate
- Arrow, rectangle, ellipse, line, pen, highlighter, text, numbered steps, pixelate, black-out and crop, each with a single-key shortcut (A, R, O…).
- Tapered arrows and soft shadows, so annotations look good without fiddling.
- Select, move (arrow keys nudge), recolor and delete. Unlimited undo and redo.
- Backgrounds: a gradient frame with rounded corners and a shadow, for posts and docs.
- Retina-aware: files carry the right DPI, so a 2× shot shows at its real size in Keynote, Pages and Preview.
Private by design: no account, no network access, no analytics. OCR and redaction run on your Mac.
Light: a 4 MB app using about 45 MB of memory and 0 % CPU when idle.
Settings you can find things in: six tabs (General, Capture, Files, Shortcuts, Redaction, About). Every shortcut can be changed, files can be PNG or JPEG, Retina shots can be saved at 1× size, and you can add your own terms to redact: customer names, project codes, or any regular expression.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Capture area | ⌃⇧4 |
| Capture window | ⌃⇧5 |
| Capture full screen | ⌃⇧3 |
| Capture previous area | ⌃⇧6 |
| Scrolling capture (press again to finish) | ⌃⇧7 |
| Capture text / QR code | ⌃⇧2 |
| Record screen (press again to stop) | ⌃⇧8 |
All of them can be changed in Settings → Shortcuts.
While selecting: Space switches between area and window mode, ⏎ takes the whole screen, C copies the color under the cursor, Esc cancels.
In the editor: ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, ⌘C copies, ⌘S saves, ⌘⏎ finishes, ⌫ deletes the selection.
CleanShot X is excellent and does more. Here's where each one stands today:
| Glint | CleanShot X | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, MIT | Paid license |
| Area, window, full screen, previous area | ✓ | ✓ |
| Frozen screen while selecting, loupe | ✓ | ✓ |
| Quick access overlay, drag & drop | ✓ | ✓ |
| Annotate, numbered steps, pixelate, crop | ✓ | ✓ |
| Background frames | ✓ | ✓ |
| OCR, pin to screen | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scrolling capture | ✓ | ✓ |
| Screen recording, GIF | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom shortcuts, self-timer, color picker, QR | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automatic redaction of emails, IBANs, cards, keys, tokens + your own terms | ✓ | – |
| Cloud upload & share links | – | ✓ |
| Recording audio, webcam overlay | – | ✓ |
Download Glint.zip from the latest release, unzip, and move
Glint.app to /Applications. Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Universal binary.
Glint isn't notarized yet, so macOS blocks the first launch. Right-click → Open, or:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Glint.appOn first capture macOS asks for Screen Recording permission. Allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, then reopen Glint.
Only the Xcode Command Line Tools are needed, no full Xcode.
git clone https://github.com/brentc22/glint.git
cd glint
scripts/make-signing-cert.sh # once: a stable local identity keeps the permission across rebuilds
make run # build, install to /Applications, launch| Piece | How |
|---|---|
| Capture | ScreenCaptureKit (SCScreenshotManager), all displays at native resolution, before the overlay appears |
| Scrolling capture | the region grabbed ~8×/s; per-row signatures, sticky bands found by comparing frames, offset from a distinctive anchor row, confirmed by rows matching exactly so repetitive content can't slip |
| Recording | SCStream → AVAssetWriter (H.264), frames written as they arrive; GIF via AVAssetImageGenerator + ImageIO |
| Window capture | SCContentFilter(desktopIndependentWindow:), z-order from CGWindowList |
| Shortcuts | Carbon RegisterEventHotKey, which needs no Accessibility permission |
| OCR & redaction | Vision VNRecognizeTextRequest (language correction off, so keys stay intact), regex + IBAN mod-97 + Luhn, per-match boxes via boundingBox(for:) |
| Pixelate | exact block averages, not resampling, which would keep a real pixel per block |
| Rendering | one Core Graphics renderer, used by both the editor canvas and the export |
make test # 30 unit tests: matcher, renderer, stitcher, undo, OCR, GIF
make bundle # Glint.app in the repo root
Glint.app/Contents/MacOS/Glint --self-test # every capture path for real, see below
open Glint.app --args --edit docs/demo-input.png # editor on the demo image, no permission needed--self-test captures every display, a window, a region 5× (timed), records 2 s of video
and turns it into a GIF, scroll-captures a 120-line window of its own and checks that
the result is exactly as tall as the document and that OCR reads it back. Started from a
terminal it uses the terminal's Screen Recording permission.
docs/demo-input.png is a made-up settings screen full of fake sensitive data
(swift scripts/make-demo-image.swift regenerates it). The test suite checks that Redact
finds exactly its six secrets and leaves the rest alone.
Other launch arguments: --quick-access <image>, --settings <tab> and
--select-demo <image> (the selection overlay over an image instead of your screen).
Sources/
GlintCore/ annotations, renderer, redaction, OCR, undo; no AppKit, fully tested
Glint/ the menu bar app: capture, overlay, editor, pin, settings
GlintTests/ tests (a plain executable; XCTest needs full Xcode)
- Audio (microphone / system) in recordings
- Hide desktop icons while capturing
- Measure tool (distances between UI elements)
- Bring-your-own-bucket upload (S3 / R2) for share links, opt-in
- Notarized builds and a Homebrew cask
Ideas and PRs welcome. Open an issue first for anything big.