A fast, lightweight screenshot tool for Windows that lives in your system tray. Capture any part of your screen, mark it up, pin it on top of your desktop, copy text out of it, or search it on the web — all with a single keystroke.
One small portable .exe. No installer. No account. Nothing to configure before you start.
- Grab the latest
PepperSnap.exefrom the Releases page. The file name stays the same so an update replaces it in place; the version is shown in the tray tooltip, at the top of the tray menu, and in the app's window titles. - Run it. PepperSnap appears in your system tray.
- Press Ctrl + Print Screen (or left-click the tray icon) and start capturing.
💡 Right-click the tray icon and open Keyboard shortcuts and info. It's a searchable guide to everything PepperSnap can do, and it's full of tricks you'd otherwise miss.
🔐 Admin permission. PepperSnap runs with admin permission so shortcuts and capture keep working while an app running as administrator has focus — without it, a shortcut pressed over such a window silently does nothing. Windows therefore asks for that permission, with the usual UAC prompt, every time PepperSnap starts. Nothing is installed to save you that prompt: no scheduled task, no service, and no system setting beyond the per-user startup entry listed under features. If you decline the prompt, or your account has no admin permission, PepperSnap simply runs without it. One launch never prompts: if PepperSnap is already running, starting it again — or using its right-click entries — just hands the request to the copy already in the tray. To never run elevated at all, start it with the
--noelevateswitch or setRunElevated=0insettings.ini.
Every shortcut can be changed in Options → Customize keys.
| Hotkey | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ctrl + Print Screen | Capture a custom area, then annotate it |
| Shift + Print Screen | Instantly capture and save all monitors |
| Ctrl + Shift + Print Screen | Instantly re-capture and save your previous area |
| Alt + Print Screen | Search the image in your clipboard on Google Lens |
| Shift + Alt + Print Screen | Pin the image from your clipboard on top of the desktop |
| Ctrl + Alt + Print Screen | Edit the image in your clipboard |
- Custom area with pixel-precise aiming and a magnifier. Use the arrow keys to nudge by one pixel.
- Window detection. Hold Ctrl and click to snap to any window, notification pop-up or sidebar.
- Instant fullscreen across all your monitors, saved straight to your folder.
- Repeat your last capture with one hotkey. It remembers the exact shape, too.
- Non-rectangular captures. Draw circles and ellipses (hold Alt), or hold Ctrl and drag a corner to reshape the area into a quadrilateral or triangle. Corner points snap together within 12 px.
- Aspect ratio shortcuts. Lock to 1:1, 16:9, 9:16, 1:2 or 2:1 while dragging, or type any width, height or ratio you like.
- Color picker. Hold Shift and click to copy the hex code of any pixel on screen.
- Draw without losing the area. With a drawing tool selected, a drag outside the area draws there instead of replacing the area — only Select starts a new one.
- Optional cursor capture if you want the mouse pointer in your screenshots.
- Pen and Stabilo highlighter, with optional smoothing so your strokes look clean.
- Lines, arrows, rectangles and ellipses. Hold Shift for straight 15° angles and perfect squares or circles.
- Free-form shapes. Hold Alt and drag a rectangle's or square-mosaic's corner to pull it into an irregular quad or triangle — only the shape is affected, and the mosaic pixelates exactly inside it. Corners snap to other annotations and to the capture's corners.
- Numbered step arrows for tutorials and bug reports, with a one-click counter reset.
- Text boxes you type directly onto the image, in Calibri Light with an automatic glyph outline so the words read over any background.
- Mosaic / pixelate (square or circle) to hide sensitive information.
- Select mode. Move, resize, recolor or delete any annotation, individually or several at once. Click a shape that runs past the capture edge to select it, even though it sits outside the area.
- Pixel-accurate nudging. Arrow keys move the selected annotation 1 px, or 10 px with Shift.
- A one-click red swatch, S / M / L / XL sizes and an exact pixel size box.
- Full undo / redo, including the capture area itself — Ctrl + Z after an accidental new area puts the previous one back.
- Nothing is lost when the area changes. Annotations stay put; anything outside the new area is cropped from the save while still visible in the editor.
- Pin any capture as a floating, always-on-top window. Handy for references, designs, notes or chat snippets.
- Pin as many as you like. New pins tile automatically so they don't overlap.
- Scroll to resize, drag to move, snap to screen edges, and type an exact size or zoom percentage.
- Multi-select pinned images and move or control them together. Hold Shift to apply any action to all of them.
- Pin an image straight from the clipboard, or from a file via Explorer.
- Plays animated GIF and WebP files and keeps transparency intact.
- Extract text with OCR from any area of your screen. It uses Windows' built-in text recognition, so there's nothing extra to install.
- The text goes straight to your clipboard, and can optionally be saved as a
.txtfile.
- Copy any capture or pinned image and search it on Google Lens with the Search on web button in the toolbar.
- Translate on web sits left of Search on web on the custom area toolbar and opens Google Translate's image view instead of Lens. Pick the target language under Options; it starts out English. On a pinned image, Shift + click Copy takes every pinned image at once.
- Right-click any image in Explorer for:
- Edit with PepperSnap to annotate it
- Pin on top (works on several images at once)
- Search image on web
- Animated GIF and multi-frame WebP editor with a scrollable frame strip and play / pause.
- Save as PNG, JPEG, WebP or BMP, with a JPEG quality slider.
- Set a different default format for copying, custom-area captures and fullscreen captures.
- Custom file naming with a live preview. Use tokens like date, time and a running counter.
- Choose to also save when you copy, auto-save pinned images, or keep the editor open after saving.
- Save as dialog whenever you want to pick the spot yourself.
- Rebind any shortcut: global hotkeys, drawing tools, editor actions and pinned-image controls.
- Launch at Windows startup (optional) — starts it in the tray when you log on. With admin permission on, logging on shows the UAC prompt.
- Automatic update checks (daily to monthly, or off) through GitHub releases.
- Restore everything to default at any time.
- Your settings live in a plain
settings.inifile in%appdata%\PepperSnap, so they're easy to back up or move to another PC.
- Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
- OCR needs a Windows language pack with text recognition installed (most setups already have one)
PepperSnap runs entirely on your PC. The only network activity is an optional check for new releases on GitHub, which you can turn off in Options. Your screenshots are never uploaded anywhere. The "Search on web" feature simply opens Google Lens in your own browser, and "Translate on web" opens Google Translate the same way.
Apache License 2.0 — do whatever you like with it.
Enjoy! If you find a bug or have an idea, please open an issue. 🌶️