Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier

moocup.jaydip.me

43 pointsjdsane34 comments

I’ve always seen talented designers and developers post their work, only for it to get lost in the noise. I realized a major reason is that they often just post a simple, unstyled screenshot. As a result, nobody pays attention.

My solution is a tool where you can drop in a screenshot, pick from a collection of hand-picked gradients, style it, and export it—all in a few seconds. I’ve carefully designed every element of the app to be efficient, simple, and intuitive.

On making it "Free, Forever": I don't plan on ever charging a subscription for Moocup. I dislike the subscription model as much as you do. Instead, my plan is to include a donation option for those who wish to support the project. This allows me to keep my promise of making the app free and useful for everyone, without being burdened by hosting and maintenance costs.

My goal is simple: to provide a high-quality tool that is genuinely useful and doesn't waste your time. If you find it helpful, the best thing you can do is share it with others. I've included all my contact links for feedback and suggestions.

Happy designing :)

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Looking good! What does it mean that it is free forever? That the code is available on GitHub and we should not have to be concerned about the site going offline or moving to a different place (that is not free)? Or, if it takes off, that we should begin to see ads? Or that this is the free tier option and future iterations can expect you to pay to, say, remove a watermark?

this is free in the sense that users don't have to worry about paying a dime for using it. i have no current plan for any kind of monetization. it's my hobby tool that i use and expect people to use without worrying.

> free forever

conflicts with

> no current plan

no plan meaning adding features, not in the sense adding monetization.

Free forever as asking NEVER to users for any kind of money for using service.

What is this for? I don't see the use case.

I'm equally confused. Why would I want to take a perfectly good screenshot and then shrink it down so it fits within a square and fill >50% of the canvas pixels with a gradient background?

I think this is some (new?) social media trend, my school started doing it too with their images on facebook. Half the image is just a border so the actual image is really low res. I have no idea why they do it though.

Some social media sites and apps like to cut off the sides to fit content onto different screen sizes and aspect ratios.

I think adding a border is an attempt to preserve the essential parts of the images in those situations. It really should not be necessary, but alas modern/stupid problems require modern/stupid solutions.

This is a more generous explanation than my cynical first assumption, that they were trying to get away with saving lower res pictures to save on storage costs.

It's optional you can turn it off at bottom floating navbar.

so it's for drawing attention on social media?

Because it looks nice and makes it pop in a social media feed.

this is current way of showing design screenshots, as plain screenshots gets buried under and most of the time designer, or frontend devs generate their own workflow for handling this grunt work of beautifying their work. it's tool to remove that pain point.

As a dev who loves sharing stuff on X, this is super useful. You can use it to post clean screenshots for: - showing off a new UI component you built - sharing code snippets or errors with context - bug reports that don’t look like chaos

But it's not a clean screenshot. There's a space-wasting gradient fill behind it.

I can maybe see some value for opening a web page like this, then taking a set of screenshots (for me CMD+SHIFT+4) which automatically get added to the web page, which the user can then curate in some way to generate a final image for download. If the dev who built this web page can work out a way to get the web page to automatically ingest user screenshots while the page is open then I think this tool becomes a lot more interesting.

I did a similar thing for generating a video from multiple screen captures - GitHub repo here: https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder

I was recently looking for something like this to share some fun screenshots of a new UI. Would be cool to see some depth of field or bokeh effects.

nice! I was looking for a tool like this a while ago. All I could find were either nice paid ones or some pretty crappy free options. I have to shamefully admit I ended up using the free version of Pika and just cropped out the watermark :D Yours looks solid and free. I'd suggest adding a few things like slider for corner radius, shadows, and frames (like macOS, browser, etc.)."

glad you liked it. In bottom navbar, there is "Border" section where you can adjust border radius, color. If possible follow me on my socials so I can provide updates and receive feedback. my dm's are always open :)

Looks great, congrats on the launch.

Could you tell us more about how you made it? What libraries did you use, or did you code it with an AI?

This is a frame generator. It accepts images, assumed to be screenshots, as an input.

yup, that's exactly right.

Shoutout to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719833

which is another nice one I like

I liked its output. Maybe there is a use for it?

hello compliments for moocup, your screenshot generator is convenient, fast and really easy to use for example for X o bsky. Some tips, currently there are only a few colors for the borders, I would also like to have the possibility of a movement or transaction and export to gif. what do you think would be possible? thanks

hey, thank you for the kind words. I'm planning to add a color picker so users can pick color of their choice. currently, I have no plans of adding option for any video format. as it is my hobby project, i'd like to focus more on the primary features that might be needed. although i like the possibility of it.

How is this a screenshot generator? You have to drag an existing image onto it...

The title is a bit misleading, he actually generated a screenshot beautifier.

yeah, it is a screenshot beautifier in a sense.

It's nice. I actually pay for something like this.

The only thing I think I would need to switch is canvas size, ideally where I can select sizes for Twitter, Instagram etc.

Being able to paste an image would be nice too.

Nice work!

What value does it provide? (Genuine question, not intended as snarky!)

I use a similar tool, Gradia.

https://github.com/AlexanderVanhee/Gradia

The border can look nice in certain settings, the annotation tools are handy for drawing attention to specific elements. It has the ability to hide/mask things too. All wrapped in a nice intuitive interface.

Hi; i'm the creator of tool. it's supposed to be sharing your product screenshots as input, using gradient backgrounds and some borders; which it'll automatically try to assign ass some curvatures and such. and export.

This process is repeated daily by designers, frontend devs, indie builders who creates products, ui snippets that they want world to see and grab their attention. as if you share a normal screenshot, most of the people would simply ignore it. in the sense, sometimes if you present your output wrapped in a good wrapper people would perceive it to be of high value and assess further results as such.

hopefully that clears up!

great to hear, i plan to keep moocup free, forever. it is my hobby project and accept coffee payments to support it. but no plans of any kind of monthly plans whatsoever. I want user to come, drop some photos and within few seconds produce beautiful output. i hate subscriptions myself, and do not want to burden users with it. let me know of possibility of supporting it via coffee payments, which users would support if they wish to.

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