CleanShot's polish. Shottr's speed. Plus the bits both of them are still missing, because I got tired of waiting and built them myself.
Capture six ways, annotate with thirteen tools, beautify, record and edit video, then find any shot again with on-device AI. Here's what each one actually looks like.
Screenshot, record, fullscreen, window, scrolling capture and timer — pick a mode, drag once, done. Lovely also makes peace with the built-in ⌘⇧4, so one press means one capture, never a duplicate.
Arrows, callouts, numbered step badges, highlight, blur, spotlight and a pixel ruler — each a single keypress. Draw several in a row without re-selecting, pick a colour, then copy or save in one tap.
Drop a screenshot onto a warm, hand-named gradient with padding, rounded corners and a soft shadow. One-tap auto-balance composes the whole look — perfect for docs, changelogs and social.
Record your screen to MP4, GIF or MOV, then edit on a genuine timeline — split, multi-clip, timed zoom & blur, voice-over and a webcam bubble you move in post. No other menu-bar tool ships a screen recorder this complete.
Stitch a long webpage, chat thread or wide spreadsheet into one clean image. A live preview shows each frame as it aligns, and it recovers gracefully if you scroll too fast — most tools only do vertical.
On-device AI (Apple's MobileCLIP) plus OCR lets you type "red button" or "terminal" and surface the right shot in your history — no filenames, no folders. Everything is indexed locally and nothing ever leaves your Mac.
Pull text out of any screenshot in one tap. Smart redaction softly blurs emails, cards, keys and tokens — never brutal black boxes.
Add a draggable webcam bubble and a recorded voice-over — reposition the camera after the fact, at any split in the timeline.
Run your own scripts and webhooks after a capture — send a shot anywhere, upload to S3, or copy a link. No cloud account required.
Drop multiple screenshots onto a single canvas and mark them up together — ideal for before-and-afters and side-by-sides.
Capture, OCR and AI search all run locally. Your shots live in a folder you control and are never uploaded — no account, no cloud.
Lovely is built in the open. The roadmap is the requests board — features often land in the very next weekly build.
Pick a background, drag the padding & corners. This is the real thing.
The honest version. This is why I stopped paying for the others.
No subscription. One payment. Every future update included.
The beta is free and out now — grab it on the install page. Leave your email to hear when 1.0 and Lovely Pro land. One email, no spam.
Lovely is in early access, so your feedback shapes it directly. Missing a feature, hit a rough edge? Tell me and I'll do my best to fix it, sometimes in the very next weekly build.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon & Intel · ~14 MB
Download for macOSSmall, frequent updates — driven by what people ask for.
Yes — the core app is free, for everyone, for real. Capture, annotate, record, history: all of it. Lovely Pro is a one-time $12 upgrade (never a subscription) that unlocks beautify backgrounds, higher export quality, voice-over, multi-clip editing, scrolling capture, the webcam layer and automation.
The beta is code-signed but not yet notarized — notarization needs a $99/year Apple developer account, which is coming with 1.0. The app is safe, and the install page shows the two-click way to open it in the meantime.
No. Capture, OCR and AI search all run on-device, and your shots live in a local folder you control. Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you set up S3 or webhooks yourself — and even then, only when you trigger them.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on both Apple silicon and Intel. The whole app is about 14 MB.
Weekly-ish. The roadmap is the requests board — you ask, I ship. Several current features started life as a one-line request from a stranger.
The app updates itself quietly (via Sparkle) and shows you what's new. Installed with Homebrew? brew upgrade works too. No launcher, no account, no nagging.
No — it makes peace with it. Lovely uses the shortcuts you already know (⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4, ⌘⇧5, ⌘⇧6) and switches off the built-in macOS handler for exactly those combos, so one press means one screenshot. Flip the toggle in Settings → Shortcuts, or rebind Lovely's keys, and the native ones come straight back.
Pro launches alongside 1.0 as a one-time $12 purchase through Lemon Squeezy — no subscription, no account to create. Until then, the whole beta is free. And if Pro ever isn't for you, reply to your receipt and I'll refund it — no forms, no guilt trip.
something else on your mind? ask on the board above — I read every one