Zappy – Screen capture tool
zapier.com
zapier.com
I'm Mike, co-founder at Zapier and head of Zapier Labs. Today our Labs team is launching a public version of Zappy: a fast, free screen capture tool that we built for our remote team. At Zapier, we have 300+ teammates working from across the globe with no central office—we've been fully remote since day one. We've learned that increasing communication bandwidth is crucial when you're working remotely.
I wanted a tool for screenshots/GIFs to supplement apps like Slack, but nothing on the market had the mix of speed and features we were looking for. So, built it internally. Zappy is a cornerstone of how we work at Zapier, nearly everyone at Zapier uses Zappy every week (voluntarily)! And we want to share it.
Why share now? People around the world just experienced a sudden shift to remote work—and we know life sans-office comes with unique challenges. We want to share our experience and make that transition a little easier.
Our goal with Zappy was to provide a screen capture experience that was so fast, people would actually want to use it to communicate. To capture something, you hit a keyboard shortcut, draw a square, and press enter. Zappy copies the image to your clipboard so you can paste it anywhere (or provides a path to your GIF/video).
You can draw annotations, record a selfie view, and stitch shots together. Captures support image, GIF, and MP4 formats. One of my favorite features is being able to grab past captures from the Mac menu bar, instead of digging through folders.
We're working on more features, too, like self-hosted captures on S3, sharing permissions, and a Zapier integration. :-)
Zappy is free to download and use for anyone (you'll need a free Zapier account to log in once). And, for paid Zapier customers, you'll get free capture hosting while it's in early access.
I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. I hope you find Zappy useful!
I'm not interested in the selfie tool.
As well as having a bunch of useful tools for people working with screens, such as ruler, color picker, and a QR reader.
It can things I didn't know I would like to have :D
For example, I once needed to take a very precise crop off a screenshot, and thought "it would be nice if there was a way of fine tuning the mouse position". My first thought was somehow using the arrow keys, I pressed one of them and voila! The mouse moved a single pixel in that direction.
It's hard to pinpoint in specific features, but the best description is that ShareX is a very well laid out workshop, with everything within reach and nothing in the way.
In addition to speed, it's an all-in-one tool that does annotations, GIFs, and screen recording (with optional audio and selfie camera) and we optimized those flow for speed, too.
In comparison, shareX is far more feature rich with the exception of selfie capture.
However, it appears that shareX is only available on Windows and Zappy only on Mac
Did you have a look at Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com)? We offer video recording, screenshot capture + annotation, file sharing, and more - all wrapped up in an easy to use Mac menu bar and Windows system tray app. On quick capture (or upload), it copies a shareable link to the clipboard so you can quickly share it anywhere. :-)
The reason for so many features is because we've been working on our platform since 2012 and we continue to add more features every month.
Lightshot comes the closest to a decent, light, free alternative but it's still not ideal.
The built in Windows tool is nice (win + shift + S) but there's no arrows, it's a faff to get straight lines and it's just up to the quality of the OSX tools.
I started making one but like all side projects it just sits there waiting for that elusive "free time".
Thanks
- Draw a straight line on an image (you have to pick the ruler, then draw along the ruler)
- Drawn an arrow on an image (not freehand)
- surround something with a box
- Add some text
It just falls too short
I am amazed it hasnt been ported to linux yet
If a product requires online credentials to use it, but the use-case doesn't demand them, I delete it.
It's nothing personal, there's just not a bright line from "take a screenshot, mark it up, make a video etc." to "login to some site", so off it goes.
- The signup process felt disjointed. I was excited to give Zappy a try but then fell into a Zapier signup and onboarding flow with Zapier messaging, etc. I was greeted with a Zapier trial when all I really signed up for was Zappy? Anyhow, not to nitpick but the experience and value perception here could be better. I understand Zappy is an acquisition tool but think it could be more relevant, example, when I actually do take a Zappy, poke me with an automation suggestion on how i might leverage Zapier to easily share that to a slack channel..
- I honestly could not figure out how to use Zappy. I installed the tool successfully, clicked the donut in my top bar and couldn't figure it out. I finally realized you have to click the orange donut in the drop-down to activate the tool. Suggestion, instead of your empty state CTA being a push to join a Zapier paid plan, make it an arrow pointing to the orange donut, I bet you a donut that'll alone increase conversion on # of Zappy's taken. Run an experiment and let me know. I bet this also represents a large friction point for your users.
- How do I delete a Zappy? I still can't figure this one out.
- I am unable to create a shortcut. I keep pressing "press combination" but can't seem to create a shortcut.
One thing I always try to strive towards is extreme empathy for the user, literally put yourself into the shoes of your customer and make every effort to see/experience the product through their mindset. Complexity is an unfortunate aspect of most products, the good products just do a good job of emerging users into that complexity.
Oh well, maybe it can evolve into that.
If you're compiling feature requests, it would also be nice if this could generate simulations in SCORM format for e-learning: that will help for onboarding.
Thank you for sharing this on HN. You are the Co-Founder and posted on Show HN[1] before this thread but this thread posted by someone else gained more steam.
Videos are great, but they aren't searchable in Slack. And when you're trying to share team knowledge, the text is important.
A descent transcription would be a good start.
They also let me use a custom domain as part of their platform. That makes it look like the images are hosted by me and not them.
I’d have switched a long, long, long, time ago if they didn’t have that feature.
Might make sense to also add that to your tool.
PrintScr: Whole screen to png in pictures folder Shift+PrintScr: Drag box over area to screenshot Alt+PrintScr: Screenshot the window, with a transparent box shadow around it Adding ctrl to any of those puts it on clipboard instead of pictures folder
Ctrl Shift Alt R records a 30 second webm of the desktop
Very good to know!
For screenshots, I have loved using [Xnip](https://xnipapp.com/) above the built in screenshot maker.
As far as the developer is concerned, I can't see it being worth their effort to make and sell this product at 1/10th the current price.
I absolutely can. Imagine how much bigger the audience would be.
Not related to the company, just a happy customer.
Also, you can record the screen using Quicktime for years... But noticed as of Catalina it works much better with the high-res screen recording.
That being said, I'm wondering what this tool adds that current MacOS not already offer built in to your Mac already.
1. Capture with a shortcut - Mac has various depending on what you want to do, Command-Shift-4 being the one that matches what Zappy does but Command-Shift-5 is my new go-to as well.
2. Highlight what’s important with annotations - On Mac, as soon you take a screenshot you see a little thumbnail popup, click on it and you can annotate it with everything available in the Mac Preview app. Zappy seems to just take away one click and the UI looks simpler.
3. Press enter to save - Once you take the screenshot it is saved, dont have to wait for enter.
4. Upload captures instantly (Paid Feature) - Personally I set my mac to send my screenshots to a google drive folder, so they are immediately shareable from the cloud if I want them to be, plus it's free. Can do the same with Dropbox, Box, etc
other mentions:
- Create GIFs and screen recordings quickly - I like the idea of Gif recording, I've been using LICEcap[1] for a few years now but it would be nice to have it all in one place
- Stitch shots together to show the full picture - Would like to see an example of this
- Grab past captures from anywhere - "Stop digging through disorganized folders. Just click a capture to copy its link." I feel like there's some disconnect between this feature's title and it's description. Don't you have to find the past capture to click on it?
I used to use Dropbox, but as I started using other tools to sync my files I decided it wasn't worth the $10/month or whatever it costs now just to have a screenshot sharing tool. I pay for GSuite, but it's super difficult to host a screenshot there, and also to look at one.
Basically, I'm already paying for way more cloud storage than I need in both Apple and Google, and I already have a sufficient screenshot tool, so it's hard to justify (especially to my partner) that the $x/month line item on our credit card statement is for screenshot hosting.
I use this in GH issues, my personal journal, Slack... it’s insane how sticky this workflow is.
This plus Zapier sounds amazing.
They hit the nail in the head with this one. Could argue it took too long but the fact that I consider myself a power user of this flow and want this Zappy thing asap is a good sign for Zapier.
Meanwhile, on Linux we are suffering! Firefox has a built-in screenshot tool now, but just try figuring out how the hell to draw an arrow or something on one using GIMP or Inkscape! The once-promising Shutter¹ now looks to be unmaintained (not even packaged in Arch Linux because it was essentially spit, chewing gum, and a bunch of Perl packages) and won't even work in Wayland.
- Drag to drop image directly after creating it
- Visually appealing arrows/annotations
- No account necessary
I still haven't seen paid or free screenshot tools that are able to compete with Skitch's ease.
What I need is a tool that lets me quickly snap a screenshot of a part of my screen and drag the resulting PNG somewhere, possibly annotating it with a couple of rectangles and arrows in the process.
I've been using Annotate for that purpose for the last several years and it works fine. I learned my lesson and I am not about to use another tool designed to drive signups.
I'm about to start needing to record about 100 product demos about 20 second long. Ideally ported to gif.
I want to be able to 1.25x speed them as well if possible?
asciinema works very well for recording / capturing terminal session (Linux + macOS).