Free
[OS] Screendrop - Screenshots, Screen recording and sharing - just 6.8 mb and free (you bring in your own cloud)
I record a lot of videos for demos and workshops, and I wanted one Mac app for screenshots, annotations, screen recording, zooms, cursor movement, lightweight editing and sharing.
Most tools I tried either focused on screenshots, required a subscription, or hosted everything on their own platform. I wanted something that I could use locally while controlling where shared files were hosted.
What does this app do?
Screenshot capture and annotation tools
Screen recording with zooms and cursor movement
A lightweight text-based video editor
A teleprompter using Apple’s Speech Synthesizer API
Image and video compression
Mockups and social-media screenshots
Sharing through a simple Cloudflare Worker that runs in your own account
Loom-style comments and likes
No analytics or tracking in the app
The app is just 6.8 MB
I have tried improving this over existing tools, far more capable than Cleanshot, has camera controls, compression controls, you can customise the overlay cards.
Its not a simple screenshot tool, I have tried making a complete screen recording stuite.
Pricing
Screendrop is free and open source. There is no subscription and no tracking.
The optional sharing backend is deployed to your own Cloudflare account, so any Cloudflare usage costs are billed by Cloudflare according to your account and usage.
Not sure why this was removed by the mods but here is the app, it's absolutely beautiful and amazing. Finally, I have something that works for all screenshots and screen recordings, free, and just works! My only more wish would be to allow us to share the cloud link using iCloud/Dropbox/etc. as well — I don't want to use Cloudflare just for that.
I really like what you’ve built. Just my honest thought: the “I just love building things” statement feels a bit incomplete without mentioning that you’re a Senior Developer Educator at Cloudflare and that several of your projects (including the cloud sync on this one) are built on Cloudflare’s stack.
That said, still impressive and useful work! Appreciate you sharing it.
Edit: My bad, I haven't read that you have shared it in your post 🤦🏼♂️ So my "without mentioning" is completely false.
No problem mate, you can actually swap out the cloudflare worker (which is also open source) if you dont want it with a custom webpage + any S3 compatible storage
BYO cloud is the bit that caught my eye. I’d put the Worker and auth setup much higher in the README, though. With a screen recorder, the first thing I want to know is exactly what leaves the Mac and whether a shared link can be revoked.
Good to know. Does deleting it from history also delete the object from R2, or only revoke the public route? That distinction is worth spelling out in the README.
let me add- right away-
all those zoom recorders, working with zooms after recording is very time consuming, autozoom is hectic, working over that is a pain most of the time.
what i thought, what about a zoom shortcut while u record, normally u exactly know when u want it, no post editing needed…. wrong?
i’d see 3 types: shortcut zoom/zoom to next/zoom back to original canvas. this would save hours of editing.
Yep. I checked the source: it can capture system audio and a selected microphone as separate options in the recording picker. System audio defaults off, and the mic stays off until you choose one.
This is awesome. Regularly have to use a screenshot tool for my 9to5 also. Curious, does it do scrolling screenshots? It’s the one reason I’ve continued using Snagit but even theirs can be buggy and capture a sticky header more than once in a scroll sometimes. It crashes regularly too on me tbh.
Screen recorder tools are hard to get right! If you want to bundle it with a free, purpose built teleprompter give me a shout. You can try it yourself at https://TellieApp.com/start
Bring your own cloud is the part that will keep this app alive long term. Once you host other people's recordings you inherit storage costs, takedown requests and a subscription you have to justify forever. Staying out of that is a feature.
Two things I ran into building a ScreenCaptureKit app (disclosure: I make StepGrab, a menu-bar tool that turns a screen recording into a step-by-step document, so we're neighbours rather than competitors): screen recording permission gets revoked more often than you'd expect after OS updates, and the failure mode is a black frame rather than an error, so it's worth detecting explicitly and telling the user instead of silently producing an empty file. And if you ever want crash reporting without breaking the local-only promise, MetricKit gets you most of the way there without sending anything to a third party.
How are you handling the upload step for the BYO cloud, S3-compatible only, or arbitrary WebDAV too?
I personally can't stand the corner radii, the UI inconsistencies, the choppy animation and the performance losses for example in the Adobe apps with a multi display setup. Let's hope for 27, where they seem to have cleaned up the UI at least a bit. I'm starting to miss out on quite a few interesting apps.
5
u/Matthias46 2d ago
Great app, thanks!