What’s new in iSkitch
Every iSkitch release, newest first. Updates are free for everyone who owns the app.
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One shortcut for all three capture modes, and zoom with ⌘ + scroll
- New A mode bar while capturing, like the one from ⇧⌘5: Region · Window · Full Screen and Cancel, at the bottom of the screen. Switch with the mouse or with the keys 1, 2 and 3, so a single shortcut (⌥⌘4 or ⌥⌘5) reaches all three modes. The per-mode shortcuts are still there.
- New Zoom with ⌘ + the mouse wheel, and with the trackpad pinch. Over the canvas, ⌘ + wheel zooms in and out in the same steps as ⌘+ and ⌘−; on the trackpad the zoom is continuous. Without ⌘, the wheel still scrolls the image.
- Fixed A capture opened at 51 % even when it fitted at 100 %. The initial zoom was worked out during the editor's first layout pass, while the window was still at its 800x600 minimum, and stayed locked there. It is now decided with the real window size: 100 % when the image fits, scaled down only when it doesn't. The bug dates back to 1.4.0.
- Fixed The open editor covered what you were about to capture. With a capture already open, starting another one brought the editor to the front, on top of the window you wanted. The capture overlay now becomes the key window before the app activates, and the editor stays where it was.
- Fixed Without Screen Recording permission, a capture no longer opens the overlay. The system dialog came up underneath the full-screen overlay, which took all the clicks, so the only way out was to cancel. iSkitch now tries a 2x2 px test capture first; if it fails, the system dialog appears on a clear screen and the Welcome and permissions screen explains the restart.
- Improved A click without dragging no longer closes the capture. It stays open so you can pick another mode in the bar; Escape or Cancel still exits.
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WebP, quality where you save, and Resize in plain sight
- New Export to WebP: in Settings, in the editor's save button and in the save dialog, with adjustable quality and transparency preserved. 100% saves lossless. macOS reads WebP but still can't write it, so iSkitch brings its own encoder.
- New Format and quality in the save dialog itself: a Format pop-up and, for JPEG and WebP, a Quality slider — like Preview's Export sheet. What you choose there becomes the default. The slider in Settings ▸ Capture ▸ Output now appears for any lossy format.
- New Resize Image, in plain sight: ⇧⌘R, a button in the crop bar and another next to the pixel dimensions at the bottom of the editor. It was always in the Image menu; now you can find it.
- Fixed The crop bar showed points, not pixels: on a Retina capture it said 1280x800 while the bottom bar said 2560x1600. It now works in pixels and says so, and typing 1281 crops to exactly 1281 (it used to give 1282).
- Fixed JPEG at 80% is now really 80%: macOS's built-in encoder has its own quality scale, and its 80 wrote the tables every other tool (Affinity, XnConvert, Squoosh, ImageMagick) calls 94, so the file came out up to three times bigger than theirs at the same setting. The slider is now calibrated to the standard scale: the number you pick is the one any tool reads back from the file, and sizes are on a par. A user measured it across five apps.
- Fixed Small images open centred: the editor window doesn't go below 800x600, and an image smaller than that sat in the top-left corner. It now opens centred (at 100% if it fits, scaled down if it doesn't).
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No Screen Recording permission? That works too
- New New from Clipboard: File ▸ New from Clipboard (⇧⌘N, Skitch's shortcut) opens whatever image is on the clipboard in the editor — and so does Edit ▸ Paste (⌘V) whenever no text field is waiting for it. The old habit is back: ⌃⇧⌘4 in macOS, then paste. It doesn't go through screen capture, so it needs no Screen Recording permission, and a Retina capture keeps its 2× pixels.
- New When a capture fails for lack of permission, the alert now explains the two ways around it — keep using macOS's ⇧⌘4 and let iSkitch open each screenshot, or paste with ⇧⌘N — with a button that turns the first one on right there. The welcome window and Settings ▸ Capture say so too.
- Fixed Region and full-screen captures on a display running at a scaled resolution (for example a 4K monitor set to 2560×1440) came out at 1× or blurry. iSkitch now takes the region through the same screenshot machinery as macOS's ⇧⌘4 — pixel for pixel identical.
- Fixed “Open editor after a system screenshot” now always opens the editor. It silently depended on the general “Open the editor” setting for iSkitch's own captures, so with that one off the watched screenshot opened nothing.
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Captures, as they should have been
- New Window captures now come with the window's shadow and rounded corners, on a transparent background instead of whatever was on the desktop behind it.
- New Capture the window you're already working in, straight away with ⌥⇧⌘5 — no need to point and click at it.
- New Resize the image from Image ▸ Resize Image…, in pixels, with proportions locked and 25/50/75/100% presets. Annotations scale with it, and ⌘Z undoes the whole thing.
- New Export to GIF and BMP, on top of PNG, JPG, TIFF and PDF.
- New The strength of pixelation and blur is now adjustable, per annotation: hint at an IP address and make a password completely unreadable in the same screenshot.
- New All five capture shortcuts can be changed one by one in Settings ▸ Capture ▸ Shortcut.
- Fixed Capturing a window now captures that window. It used to grab the screen and crop the window's rectangle, so anything sitting on top came along with it.
- Fixed ⌥⌘5, ⌥⌘3 and ⌥⇧⌘4 work from any app. Only ⌥⌘4 was a real global shortcut; the rest needed iSkitch to be in front.
- Fixed JPEG and BMP no longer frame transparent areas in black — they are composited onto white first.
- Fixed The bottom bar reported half the pixels a capture really had, and resizing started from that wrong figure.
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Stamps, the way Skitch did them
- New Exclamation (!) and question (?) stamps: the Stamp tool now offers seven variants.
- New Every stamp is drawn on a coloured disc with the sign in white, the way Skitch did it. Before, only the numbered stamp had it.
- New A tail to point with: drag the handle that appears to the right of a stamp and it points wherever you want, like the tip of a speech bubble.
- New Text beside the stamp: double-click it and type a label. On numbered stamps, double-clicking edits the number.
- Fixed The Screen Recording permission is no longer asked for over and over. The welcome window checked it with a call that makes the system dialog appear — and it did so every two seconds.
- Fixed Resizing no longer changes anything until the mouse actually moves. Before, a change slipped in that ⌘Z wouldn't undo.
- Fixed The freehand tool is no longer called a “pen” in Indonesian, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
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The app in 18 languages
- New Ten new languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Turkish, Czech, Indonesian and Catalan — eighteen in total.
- Fixed The “open” arrowhead no longer reads as the verb “open”: it was an adjective translated as a verb in six of the seven existing languages.
- Fixed Clearer labels in the languages that were already there: “Filled” and “Outline” now read right for shapes, the Settings section is “Sound” instead of “Feedback”, the Spotlight tool is translated rather than left in English, and the Pen tool is a pencil, not a bezier pen.
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Accessibility and reliability
- New Accessibility: VoiceOver now names the controls, tools, colors and annotations with their state, and you can work without a mouse — arrow keys move the selection and define a capture, Return confirms.
- New Region and window capture works on any display, not just the main one.
- New Copy the image from the Edit menu with a shortcut (⌘⇧C), and Undo/Redo are in the menu too.
- Improved Copying is now instant, and capturing straight to the clipboard confirms when it is done.
- Improved Cropping responds to the keyboard (Escape cancels, Return applies) and behaves the same from every menu.
- Fixed Fixed a memory leak in long sessions, undo after cropping or rotating, and a save that could fail silently.
- Fixed Saving or copying a large screenshot no longer loses your annotations: the file was written without them and the window closed as if saved. Now it warns you and exports nothing.
- Fixed Hidden areas are always fully opaque: pixelate and blur no longer fall back to a translucent gray that could still be read.
- Improved Saving and sharing full-screen captures is much faster — they were processed at four times the size needed.
- Fixed The default save folder is remembered between launches, and watching the system screenshots folder no longer stops when you change it.
- Improved iSkitch no longer even requests network access. It never used it: no telemetry, no update checks, no connections.
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Edit text you’ve already added
- New Edit a text annotation after creating it: double-click it with the Select tool, or click it with the Text tool to change the words.
- Improved Selecting a text now shows its color, font, size and bold/italic in the top bar, so you can restyle it without switching tools.
- Fixed New text now keeps the font you’ve chosen from the very first character.
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True-size windows and precision cursors
- New Precision tool cursors: every drawing tool (and crop) shows a crosshair with a mini icon of the active tool, switching instantly when you change tools.
- Improved The editor window now opens sized to your capture at 100% zoom when it fits on screen — no more fixed window with a shrunken image.
- Improved On multiple displays, the editor opens on the screen where you’re working, not always the main one.
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Faster documentation
- New Numbered stamps (1·2·3) that auto-increment — perfect for tutorials and runbooks.
- New Capture timer: a 3/5/10s countdown before the shot, to open a menu or trigger a hover state.
- New Recapture the last region with a single shortcut, without selecting again.
- New Multi-display: choose which screen to capture in full screen.
- New Quick capture: send a region or the full screen straight to the clipboard or a file, skipping the editor.
- New Copy to clipboard at full size (1x) so Retina screenshots paste at full resolution — plus a size and resolution (DPI) readout in the editor.
- Fixed Cropping now shows your annotations too, so you crop the full composition.
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Smarter cropping
- Improved Crop now fits the whole image to the window, with everything selected by default.
- Improved Crop handles and the rule-of-thirds grid stay a comfortable size at any zoom.
- Fixed Fixed a stray resize cursor when opening an image.
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Menus & polish
- Fixed The full macOS menu bar (File, Edit, Capture, Image, Tools) now reliably appears in the editor.
- Improved Clearer Save button — pick the format from a dedicated menu and save in one click.
- Improved Expanded, fully localized About window.
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Capture, your way
- New Open the editor automatically after a system screenshot.
- New Choose what happens after each capture: show, copy or save.
- New Customisable capture shortcut.
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Eight languages
- New Added French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean.
- Improved Expanded, fully localized About window.
- Improved Many editor refinements.
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Hello, iSkitch
- New First release: capture a region, window or the full screen.
- New 14 annotation tools and native macOS sharing.
- New Privacy-first: no accounts, no tracking, nothing leaves your Mac.