The screenshot tool that keeps up

iShot is a fast, native macOS screenshot tool for people who capture a lot — and don’t want to break flow to do it. A hotkey gets you capturing, annotating, copying text off the screen, scanning a QR code, translating what you see, or recording a video with a camera bubble — all without leaving your Mac.

Text recognition, QR scanning, and annotating all run on-device, using the Mac’s own models — no internet call for any of it. Translation is the exception, and it’s worth being precise: it uses the AI service whose API key you add yourself (ChatGPT, Claude, or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint), so translated text goes only to the provider you chose, never to a server of ours. We don’t run one. There’s also no account, no mandatory cloud upload, and no subscription — you buy once, it’s yours.

Why this app exists

The developer, Tuan Tran, kept chaining three tools for one job: a screenshot utility, a separate text-extraction app, and a translator tab — usually to deal with a foreign-language error dialog or a Korean UI screenshot from a colleague. Every chain broke somewhere: uploads to stranger’s servers, subscriptions for a button you press ten times a week, a 200 MB app doing what 5 MB of macOS could. iShot is the one-app answer: capture, read the text, translate it on your terms, mark it up, done.

How we work

iShot is built in pure Swift by one person, which means short cycles and direct contact — the email you send is read by the person who ships the fix. The comparison pages on this site disclose that the author is not neutral, cite each competitor’s own pages, and get re-checked quarterly. If you catch a stale claim, tell us and it gets fixed the same day.

If iShot saved you time, the most useful thing you can do is tell someone, or write a review wherever you found it — an early app lives on honest word of mouth. And Ko-fi is there if you feel generous.

Questions, feature requests, or a bug: get in touch. The fine print lives in the privacy policy.