ScreenShelf app icon: a wooden tray holding screenshots

Your screenshots,
one key away.

ScreenShelf lives in your Mac's menu bar. Take a screenshot and it slides into the corner, ready to drag. Press a key and see them all big. Sort them into folders, search inside them, forget about the rest.

Download for macOS — free Buy me a coffee

Version 2.1 · macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon & Intel · about 2 MB · no account, no cloud

The ScreenShelf window: a 4 by 2 grid of large screenshot thumbnails, a search field, and a folder column on the right

Why I built this

As a power user, I take a lot of screenshots: invoices, chats, bits of code, things I want to show someone later. For years I kept a small menu-bar tool for them, and I kept replacing it with the next one, and the next.

None of them made me happy. Some wanted an account. Some wanted to upload my screen to their cloud. And one of them, the one I used the longest, quietly sat at a third of a CPU core for months, re-scanning the same 1,800 files over and over. My laptop ran warm, the fan hummed, and it took a system diagnostic to find out why.

The job is tiny: show me my latest screenshots, let me grab one, let me tidy them. It should cost nothing to run.

So I wrote the tool I wanted. ScreenShelf does one thing, does it in a native Mac window, and uses zero CPU while it waits. It only looks at your folder when macOS says something changed. Text recognition, the expensive part, runs only when you ask for it, once, and is cached.

It's free. If it saves you a few minutes a week and you'd like to say thanks, there's a coffee button below.

What it does

Everything below is in the download. Nothing is locked behind a purchase.

A shelf, not a list

Click the menu-bar icon or press ⌥⇧S from any app. A big window opens centred on your screen with a 4 × 2 grid of your newest screenshots. Scroll for older ones.

Drag anywhere

Drag one screenshot, or a whole selection, straight into Slack, Mail, a browser upload, a Finder window. Double-click opens it, space shows Quick Look.

Folders on the right

Every subfolder of your screenshots folder is a drop target. Drop a screenshot on "Invoices" and it moves there. Create folders, browse them, and come back Home in one click.

Search inside screenshots

Type a word and the grid filters by file name and by the text inside the images. Recognition runs on your Mac, only when you ask, and is cached forever.

The right-click you expect

Open, Open With (real app icons), Show in Finder, Get Info, Share, Copy, Copy as Markdown, Rename, Duplicate, Resize to 50 %, Convert to JPG, Move to, Move to Trash. Just like Finder.

Catches new screenshots

While ScreenShelf runs, ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4 and ⌘⇧5 save into your shelf folder, and the app notes which program was in front when you took it.

Catch it as it lands

Take a screenshot and a big preview slides into the bottom-right corner for three seconds. Drag it straight into a chat or email, double-click to open. Miss it? It's waiting on the shelf.

Pin it, copy it

Press P to float a screenshot above your other windows while you work from it. ⌘1 to ⌘8 copies the image in that grid slot to the clipboard.

Tidies up after itself

Select and press delete to trash. Optional auto-tidy moves screenshots older than N days into an Archive folder (or the Trash). One click cleans "Screenshot 2026-10-08 at…" names.

What it doesn't do

Download and first launch

Download ScreenShelf 2.1 (zip)

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Universal build for Apple silicon and Intel Macs. This build is not yet notarised through Apple's developer program, so macOS shows an "Apple could not verify" message on first launch; the steps on the right get you past it once. A notarised build and a Mac App Store version are in preparation.

  1. Unzip and move ScreenShelf to your Applications folder.
  2. Double-click it once. macOS 15 and later shows "ScreenShelf Not Opened — Apple could not verify…". Click Done (not Move to Bin).
  3. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the Security section and click Open Anyway next to ScreenShelf, then confirm with your password. On macOS 14 you can instead right-click the app and choose Open.
  4. Click the new photo icon in your menu bar, or press ⌥⇧S. If your screenshots live in Dropbox or iCloud, macOS may ask you to allow access.
  5. Optional: turn on Launch at login in the settings (⚙) so the shelf is always a key away.

Questions people ask

Is it really free?

Yes. Every feature is in the download, there's no paid tier and no ads. If you like it, a coffee is welcome.

Which Macs?

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple silicon or Intel. One universal download.

Does it take screenshots?

No, macOS does that well already with ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4 and ⌘⇧5. ScreenShelf is what happens next: the corner preview, the shelf, folders and search.

Does it upload anything?

Not your screenshots, ever. They stay plain files in a folder you choose. The app sends one small anonymous hello a day (a random ID, the app version, the macOS version) so this page can count users; switch it off in ⚙ if you prefer. Details in the privacy note.

Why does macOS say it "could not verify" the app?

This build isn't notarised through Apple's developer program yet. Click Done, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, and click Open Anyway. Once. A notarised build is coming.

How is it different from Screenie, CleanShot X or Shottr?

CleanShot X and Shottr are capture-and-annotate tools. Screenie is a shelf, like this, but it runs text recognition all the time, which is what kept my CPU busy. ScreenShelf never scans in the background and adds folders, multi-select drag and the corner preview.

Can I search text inside screenshots?

Yes. Recognition runs on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework, only when you ask, and is cached so search is instant afterwards.