Screenshot Annotator

Annotate a screenshot online: arrows, boxes, steps, text and blur

This screenshot annotator is the quickest way to turn a raw screen grab into something people understand. Press Print Screen (or Shift+Cmd+4 on a Mac), paste with Ctrl+V, and you are drawing within a second: arrows that point at the right button, boxes and ellipses around the important part, numbered step markers for a walkthrough, free-hand pen strokes, a translucent highlighter and text labels with a readable background pill.

It also hides what should not be shared. The blur tool pixelates or softly blurs any region — email addresses, account numbers, names in a chat — by rewriting the actual pixels, so the hidden detail is gone from the saved file rather than covered by a layer someone could remove. Crop trims the screenshot to the part that matters.

Everything runs in your browser; the image never leaves your computer. Annotations stay editable (move, resize, recolour, delete, undo) until you download a PNG or JPG at full resolution or copy the result to the clipboard.

How to use the Screenshot Annotator

1. Paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac), drop an image file on the page, or click the upload area to choose one.
2. Pick a tool in the toolbar — Arrow, Box, Ellipse, Pen, Highlight, Text, Steps, Blur or Crop — and drag on the image. Steps and Text need a single click where the marker or label should go.
3. Choose a colour from the swatches and set the size slider; it controls line thickness, text size and marker size. The selected annotation changes with it too.
4. To hide sensitive data, choose Blur, pick Pixelate or Soft blur and a strength, then drag over the region.
5. Use Select to move or resize anything, Delete to remove it, and Undo / Redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y) to step back and forward.
6. Press “Download image” for a PNG or JPG at the original pixel size, or “Copy to clipboard” to paste it directly into another app.

Screenshot Annotator features

Hiding sensitive information properly

A surprising number of “redacted” screenshots online can be read back because the redaction was a semi-transparent shape, a separate layer in an editor, or a blur so gentle that the text survived. Three rules keep your screenshot safe:

• For a solid black bar instead of pixels, draw a Box in black with a large size, or use Redact Image, which is built for that job.
• Need to blur a whole photo or background rather than a region? Blur Image and Pixelate Image work on the full picture.

1. Prefer Pixelate over Soft blur for text. Pixelation replaces each block of pixels with their average — at a block size of 16 or more a line of text becomes a handful of grey squares with no recoverable shape. Soft blur looks nicer for faces and photos.
2. Make the strength larger than the text height. If the characters are 14 px tall, a block size of 8 leaves the word shape visible. Use 16–32 for normal UI text.
3. Check the export, not the preview. The preview is a scaled view; open the downloaded file at 100% and confirm nothing can be read before sharing it.

Tips for clear step-by-step screenshots

• Use the Steps tool to number the order of clicks, then describe each number in your text. Markers renumber themselves automatically when you delete one.
• Keep one accent colour (red or orange) for the thing the reader must do, and a calmer colour (blue, green) for context.
• Put text labels on a background pill; thin coloured text over a busy screenshot is hard to read in chat apps that compress images.
• Export PNG for UI screenshots (sharp text, small file for flat colours). JPG at 85–92% is better only for photographic captures. To shrink a PNG further, run it through the Image Compressor.

Export, copy and limits

Download produces a PNG (lossless) or JPG (with a quality slider) at the image’s native pixel size. “Copy to clipboard” writes a PNG with the asynchronous Clipboard API, which works in Chrome, Edge and Safari; Firefox needs the download button. Captures over roughly 8,000 px on a side may exceed canvas limits — crop them first.