Workflows
A workflow is what you do with a capture after you take it. Because Sealshot keeps every capture editable, indexed, and encryptable, the same screenshot can become an annotated bug report, a redacted bank statement, a row in a spreadsheet, or just something you find again in three weeks. These pages describe the jobs that come up most, and every one of them runs through the same five stages.
1. Capture
Section titled “1. Capture”Everything starts here, and the mode you pick decides how much cleanup you avoid later.
- Smart Capture (⌘⇧C) is the one you’ll use most. Drag across a region, or hover and let smart boundary detection highlight the pane, dialog, or window under your cursor — then scroll to step outward to the next region, or back inward. The screen is frozen throughout, so menus and hover states survive.
- Fullscreen (⌘⇧F) takes one display; ⌘-click in the picker to stitch all of them into a single image.
- Delayed (⌘⇧D) runs a countdown — 3, 5, 10, or 15 seconds — before the overlay opens. This is how you capture anything that closes when you click it.
- Scrolling capture (⌘⇧W) handles content taller than the screen, scrolling and stitching a long page, thread, or statement into one seamless image.
- Live Capture (⌘⇧X) takes your whole desktop as a layered scene — every window on its own layer, each one captured in full even where another window was covering it, over the wallpaper. Raise something that was buried, rearrange the desktop, delete what you don’t need, then annotate the result.
- Recording (⌘⇧R for a window or region, ⌘⇧V for the whole screen) covers anything that only makes sense in motion.
2. Encrypt (optional)
Section titled “2. Encrypt (optional)”This stage is the odd one out in two ways: it’s the only optional one, and it’s the only automatic one. You never perform it. You decide once whether it’s on, and after that it happens to every capture without you.
Turn on Enhanced Security in Settings → Privacy & Security. Sealshot encrypts the captures you already have — there’s a progress bar — walks you through the recovery-code ceremony, and from then on every new capture is encrypted the moment it’s stored. There is nothing to do per capture, and nothing to remember.
What that covers is broader than the images: captures and recordings are AES-256-GCM encrypted on disk, and so are the search index, the undo history, and the extracted OCR text — the places where a copy of your content would otherwise sit in the clear. Viewing then requires Touch ID, your Apple Watch, or your Mac’s password, and the Privacy & Security settings themselves need authentication to open.
This stage sits second for a reason: it never slows down the first one. Capturing works even while the library is locked — only viewing needs you to unlock — so protection at rest costs you nothing at the moment you press the shortcut.
3. Refine
Section titled “3. Refine”Two different things happen in this stage: the work you do, and the work your Mac has already done for you.
What you do. Annotation tools — arrows (straight or free-drawn), lines, shapes, pen, text with a full font picker, and auto-incrementing numbered badges. Each tool remembers its own colour, opacity, and stroke, and an Outline chip keeps marks readable against any background. Crop and resize removes what isn’t the point. Blur and redaction removes what shouldn’t be there at all — and Smart Redact will find it for you, flagging API keys, tokens, account numbers, SSNs, and passport MRZ lines, pre-checked for review. Redaction is a solid fill, not a blur someone can undo. Undo survives relaunch, so a mistake three days ago is still reversible.
What your Mac does. Every capture is OCR’d on arrival and given a title, summary, and Smart Keywords from what’s visible. On demand, Extract Structured Data pulls tables, line items, totals, and vendor fields out as copyable text; OCR Live Text lets you select text straight off the image; Enhance Clarity and Remove Background clean up the image itself. All of it runs on your Mac.
Everything here stays editable. A .seal
package keeps annotations as live objects above
the image rather than baked pixels, so next month you move the arrow
instead of re-shooting the screenshot.
4. Organize
Section titled “4. Organize”Half of this stage is already done before you think about it.
Automatic. OCR text and Smart Keywords are indexed on arrival, which means a capture is findable without being named, tagged, or filed. If you never organize anything deliberately, search still works — it reads inside the images, and on Apple Intelligence Macs it expands your query to related terms, so “invoice” also finds “receipt”.
Deliberate. Give a capture a real title or your own tags — your tags stay yours, kept separate from the read-only generated keywords. Group captures into collections (a capture can live in several), and star the ones you keep coming back to, which pins them to Favorites.
Finding it again. The sidebar gives you All Files, Recents, Collections, and Trash, with filters by tag, by date, and by media type. Space opens a Quick Look without an editor round-trip.
The rule of thumb: organize deliberately only when a real project emerges. Everything else stays findable anyway.
5. Deliver
Section titled “5. Deliver”The last stage is where the workflows differ most, because the right output form depends entirely on who’s receiving it.
- A flattened image. ⌘S writes a PNG with annotations and redactions baked in. Select several and export to a folder to do a whole set at once. See plain exports.
- A video. File → Export to Video… writes a standard
.mp4/.movat your chosen quality and format. - An encrypted package. ⇧⌘E — Export to
Package generates a strong
passcode, takes an optional expiry date and hint, and writes a
.sealshareonly Sealshot plus the passcode can open. Send the passcode over a different channel than the file; otherwise one intercepted inbox gets both halves. - Nothing at all. Some workflows never export. If the capture was for future-you, stage 4 was the destination.
Which workflow am I in?
Section titled “Which workflow am I in?”Ask what the capture is for. If it’s for another person, you’re explaining or demonstrating. If it’s for many people over time, you’re publishing. If the risk is what’s on it, start with protect & share. If you want the text and not the picture, that’s extract.
| Workflow | Leans on |
|---|---|
| Explain something visually — a bug, a confusing control, a document someone needs to understand | Capture · Refine · Deliver |
| Publish screenshots you’ll maintain — a manual, a tutorial, release notes | Capture · Refine · Organize · Repeat · Deliver |
| Demonstrate it in motion — a narrated walkthrough, a demo, a bug that only reproduces live | Record · Deliver |
| Share sensitive captures safely — statements, IDs, contracts | Capture · Encrypt · Refine · Deliver |
| Extract data from a capture — receipts, tables, text that isn’t selectable | Capture · Extract · Deliver |
Real jobs chain two of them — a bug repro is explain plus protect — so each page ends with what it combines with.