Capture modes
Sealshot offers several ways to capture your screen. Start any of them from the menu-bar icon, or use the keyboard shortcut — each has a default you can change in Settings.
Smart Capture (area & window)
Section titled “Smart Capture (area & window)”Default: ⌘⇧C. One overlay does it all, over a frozen screen (so menus and hover states survive):
- Drag across a region to capture an area — the shot is taken the moment you release.
- ⌘-drag — or ⌘-click — when you want to adjust before capturing. The selection stays on screen with resize handles, an interior you can drag to reposition, and a size readout whose width and height you can type into for exact pixels. Return (or the ✓ button) captures; Esc (or ✕) cancels. A plain ⌘-click starts from your last capture’s size, so a run of shots can come out identically sized.
- Hover and Sealshot highlights the region under your cursor — a content pane, a dialog, a whole window — using smart boundary detection that snaps to real edges. Scroll to step outward through the regions containing the pointer, or back inward again, then click to capture exactly that. Detection works at app scale and deliberately ignores buttons, cards, toolbars, and sidebars, so in a browser you’ll usually get two stops: the page content, then the whole window. For anything smaller, drag.
Press Esc to cancel.
Drag to select. Hold ⌘ to keep the selection adjustable before you confirm.
Hover to highlight an element or window; scroll to grow the selection.
Fullscreen
Section titled “Fullscreen”Default: ⌘⇧F. One display, one shot. With a single display it captures immediately; with several, a picker opens over a frozen screen — click the display you want, or ⌘-click to capture all displays stitched into one image.
Delayed
Section titled “Delayed”Default: ⌘⇧D. Need to capture something that disappears when you click? A delayed capture runs an on-screen countdown (shown on every display), then opens the unified overlay on the frozen screen. Choose the delay — 3 (default), 5, 10, or 15 seconds — from the delay selector. Press Esc during the countdown to cancel.
A countdown gives you time to open menus or hover states.
Scrolling capture
Section titled “Scrolling capture”Default: ⌘⇧W. Capture content taller than the screen — long pages, chat threads, documents. Drag to select the scroll viewport; Sealshot scrolls the content and stitches the frames into a single seamless image.
- Auto-scroll (needs Accessibility permission): Sealshot scrolls for you and stops at the end automatically.
- Manual: you scroll the content yourself and press Return to finish.
Press Esc at any time to cancel.
Sealshot scrolls and stitches a tall page into one image.
Live Capture
Section titled “Live Capture”Default: ⌘⇧X. Capture your whole desktop as a layered scene. Live Capture grabs every on-screen window as its own layer — plus each display’s wallpaper as the backdrop — and opens them in the editor as a stack of movable objects.
- All windows. Nothing is cut off by whatever was on top — each window is captured and sits on its own layer.
- Multi-display. On one display it captures immediately. With several, a picker opens — click a display to capture its windows, or ⌘-click to capture every display into one combined scene.
- In the editor, drag windows around or auto arrange layout, bring one forward or send it back, and delete the ones you don’t need. See Live Capture scenes.
Every window becomes its own movable layer over the desktop wallpaper.
Save as…
Section titled “Save as…”Default: ⌘⇧S. Select a region and save it straight to a location you choose with a Save panel. This is a one-off export — it doesn’t add the capture to your library or touch the clipboard.
Recording
Section titled “Recording”Sealshot records video too — the screen, a window, or a region, with audio. See Screen recording.
Where captures go
Section titled “Where captures go”What happens to a finished capture — copy to the Clipboard, save to a File, or Both — is set in Settings → Capture → Capture Defaults, along with the filename format. The default is Both. Saved files land in the folder chosen under Settings → General → Storage.
Captures that produce a file open in the editor, ready to annotate. A Clipboard-only capture skips the editor — it goes straight to your clipboard so you can paste and move on.
The save location in Settings → General; the Clipboard/File/Both default
lives in Settings → Capture.