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

The Screenshelf 2.3 window: a Finder-style sidebar with Home and folders, a toolbar with New Folder, Quick Look, Pin, Delete, Settings and search, a 4-column grid of screenshot thumbnails with one selected, and a thumbnail-size slider in the status bar

TL;DR Screenshelf in five lines

If you rely on screenshots a lot in your daily work, you will absolutely love this.

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

Press ⌥⇧S in any app. A Finder-style window opens with your newest screenshots as big thumbnails, folders in a sidebar and a slider for size.

Drag anywhere

Select like in Finder (click, ⌘, ⇧, rubber band) and drag one or many straight into Slack, Mail or a browser. space is Quick Look.

Folders in the sidebar

Every subfolder is a drop target. Drop a screenshot on "Invoices" and it moves there. ⌘⇧N makes a new folder.

Search inside screenshots

Type a word and the grid filters by file name and by the text in the images. On your Mac, only when you ask, cached forever.

Catches new screenshots

While Screenshelf runs, ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4 and ⌘⇧5 land in your shelf folder, tagged with the app that was in front.

Catch it as it lands

A big preview slides into the corner for three seconds. Drag it into a chat, double-click to open, or find it on the shelf later.

Pin it, copy it

P floats a screenshot above your other windows. ⌘1 to ⌘8 copies that grid slot to the clipboard.

Tidies up after itself

delete trashes the selection. Auto-tidy archives screenshots older than N days. One click cleans the "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.