It is already on the clipboard.
Pikta captures what is on your screen, puts it straight on the clipboard and opens an editor. Everything else is a bonus. It lives in the menu bar, not the Dock - there is no main window, there are shortcuts.
For the Mac · macOS 26 or newer · headed for the Mac App Store
The clipboard first. Before editor, notice and file.
No network. No networking layer, no account, no analytics.
Shortcuts, not windows. Pikta lives in the menu bar.
The order of things
The clipboard comes first. Always.
After a capture the image is on the clipboard before an editor, a notice or a file exists. Nothing is allowed to come first, not even a resize that costs time. If all you wanted was to paste, you are done here.
What happens next is your call: open the editor, clipboard only, or clipboard and save a file right away. The choice sits in the menu bar and in Settings - it is the same setting in both places.
Capturing
Five ways, one motion
The shortcuts work everywhere, even while Pikta sits in the background, and every one of them can be reassigned. None of them needs the Accessibility permission - Pikta never asks for it.
- ⌃⇧1 Area. Drag a rectangle. Pikta remembers where it was.
- ⌃⇧2 Window. Click it - Pikta outlines it as soon as the pointer is over it.
- ⌃⇧3 Screen. All of it, nothing to aim at.
- ⌃⇧4 Repeat. The same area again, pixel for pixel, no overlay in the way.
- ⌃⇧5 Series. That same area every few seconds, for a set number of shots.
Aiming
The screen holds still
The shortcut freezes the screen. What you are looking at is a still frame, and your selection is cut out of it - nothing can move away while you take aim.
Loupe and measurements
A loupe with a pixel grid follows the pointer, and the numbers sit live on the selection: size, start, end. For the shot that has to be exact.
Your last area is still there
A dashed frame waits where you captured last. Move into it and it becomes the target; W takes it from anywhere on screen.
Eight aspect ratios
⇧ holds the ratio, Tab cycles through them: 1:1, 16:9, 16:10, 4:3, 3:2, 3:4, 9:16, 21:9.
Fine adjustments
␣ moves the selection, ⌥ draws from the centre, and the arrow keys nudge it a pixel at a time.
Shortcuts and Siri
“Take a screenshot with Pikta”
Five actions show up in the Shortcuts app, in Spotlight and for Siri: capture the screen, repeat the last area, start or stop a series, show the library, open the editor. The two captures hand the image on as a file - whatever comes next in your shortcut can work with it.
Built on App Intents, a system framework: it runs on this Mac and sends nothing anywhere. It also settles something you would otherwise have to wait for - if the fixed shortcuts do not suit you, a Shortcut gives you a key of your own.
The image travels on
“Capture screen” returns a PNG. Save it, send it, rename it - what the shortcut does next is up to you.
Pikta stays behind
The captures do not bring the app forward; they would photograph their own window. Library and Editor do, because there it is the point.
No questions asked
The series takes interval and count from the settings. A shortcut that opens a dialog is not one.
The editor
Seventeen tools, one key each
A single letter, no modifier. Every shape is its own layer and stays a vector - move it, recolour it, delete it, right up until you decide to bake it into the image.
- Select
- Select area
- Crop
- Cut out
- Read text
- Redact
- Obscure
- Highlight
- Rectangle
- Ellipse
- Line
- Arrow
- Arc
- Text
- Number
- Fill
- Eyedropper
A proper menu bar
While an editor is open, the full menu is up there: File, Edit, Tools, View. Undo says what it takes back - “Undo: Arrow”, not just ⌘Z.
⌘C copies what you mean
Usually the whole flattened image. With a shape selected, the excerpt that shape spans; with Read text running and lines marked, the text. The button says each time what it copies. Never the shape as an object: a screenshot is something you hand on as a picture, not as an arrow.
Move a piece of it
Drag a rectangle across the image and it becomes a layer of its own - either leaving a hole behind, or leaving the picture untouched and handing you a copy. Annotations stay where they are.
Text out of the picture
Pikta reads what the image says, on your Mac, with no network in between. That gives you text to copy, a suggestion of what to redact, and a search that looks inside pictures.
Actually unreadable
A gentle blur can be undone by anyone who cares to. Pikta writes underneath the slider whether a cover-up holds - and says no for as long as it does not.
Cropping that adds
The frame may reach past the edge of the picture. Then the canvas grows instead of being cut, and the new border is transparent.
Append another shot
⌘⇧A hides the editor, captures an area and adds it underneath. That is how one long receipt grows out of several screenfuls.
Image size
In pixels, in per cent, and with a resolution for print. Every calculation starts from the original size.
Pixel art
Few dots, few colours
The whole picture onto a grid: for sprites, for the Playdate, and for anything that ought to look the way things used to. Four values decide how it turns out - how coarse the grid is, how many colours there are, how hard the dots fall, and where grey tips over into black.
Grid and colours
A width in pixels, with presets for the Playdate (400 × 240 and 200 × 120). Black and white, greyscale, colours taken from the image - or your own palette.
Hardness and threshold
Hardness decides whether there is any patterning at all, from a clean paper cut to full dithering. The threshold decides where the middle sits - a dark picture wants it lower.
Scattered or ordered
Error diffusion looks grainy; a fixed pattern stays even and calm. If something in your game scrolls, the fixed pattern is the one you want.
Versions and saving
Every conversion is a version, named after its settings - lay three grids side by side instead of clicking back. Saving at grid size is optional: one cell, one pixel.
The library
A shelf, if you want one
It is off until you turn it on - without it Pikta keeps nothing. Turned on, it files every capture as a PNG in your own iCloud folder, with the layers alongside it: the arrow you drew yesterday can still be moved tomorrow.
Collections gather captures under a name. Tags are a property, not a place: a tagged picture stays in the history where you left it and carries a small coloured marker. And the search reaches into what the picture says - "basket" finds the shot from the week before last, even if all it is called is a date.
Putting an old capture back on the clipboard is one click: the button in the toolbar, ⌘C, or the context menu.
Privacy
What Pikta does not do
A screenshot is the most private thing a tool is ever handed. Everything else follows from that.
No networking layer
No server, no statistics, no crash reporting. There is no place in Pikta that sends anything anywhere.
No third-party packages
Everything comes from Apple or from this project.
Pictures never leave your Mac
Captures go to your own iCloud if you switch the library on, and nowhere else.
Analysis stays on the device
Text recognition, data detection and the name suggestions all run on this Mac. The language model could ask other providers as well - Pikta does not, not even where it would be free.
In full, and checkable line by line: the privacy statement for Pikta - still German only, an English edition is on the list.
Where it stands
Built, and being put through its paces
Pikta runs on macOS 26 and is in testing. The interface speaks German and English and follows whatever your Mac is set to; you can override it in Settings. A short welcome walks you through the essentials the first time, and the manual stays inside the app.
A question, a bug, an idea: [email protected].