Capture Studio is a screenshot, screen recording, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool for macOS, running persistently in the menu bar. Pressing the shortcut key captures instantly, without having to open any windows first.

THE PROBLEMS IT SOLVES

Taking screenshots with the built-in macOS tool is a done deal — if you want to highlight an area, number steps, or obscure an email line before sending it to someone, you have to open Preview or another app. And most tools that do this well charge monthly, and none can accurately extract Vietnamese text.

Capture Studio combines all three functions in one place: capture, annotate, then save or copy. The editor opens immediately after each capture, before the file is saved.

KEY FEATURES

Select capture, a window, full screen, or a 3-second timer, with a separate shortcut for each style.

Scrolling capture — stitch together a webpage longer than the screen into one seamless image.

Extract Vietnamese text (OCR) — scan text in a screen area and send it directly to the clipboard. Using the Vision recognition system available in macOS, it runs completely offline, no API key needed, and does not upload images to any server.

Screen recording — full screen, a window, or a selected area, with microphone sound or system sound, with adjustable frame rate.

Annotate and obscure information — arrows, frames, ellipses, drawing pens, highlighters, text, numbering, and blur out anything that shouldn't be exposed.

Batch image optimization — convert an entire photo folder to WebP, JPEG, or PNG, with a quality slider and width limit. The original files remain untouched.

WHO SHOULD USE IT

Manual writers, training content creators, or those who frequently need to take screenshots with annotations. Developers and testers who need to attach images to bug reports. Anyone who often needs to extract Vietnamese text from images, scanned PDFs, or slides without wanting to retype it. And anyone who is hesitant to upload work screenshots to a cloud service with unclear storage locations.

HOW TO GET STARTED

Download the .dmg file from GitHub, drag it into the Applications folder. The first capture will prompt macOS for Screen Recording permissions — grant permission, then completely quit the app with ⌘Q and reopen it (macOS only applies this permission for the next startup).

The macOS version has been signed and notarized by Apple, so you can open it directly without security warnings. A runnable file for both Apple Silicon and Intel machines.

A Windows version (.msi and .exe) is available, which runs but is not signed, so Windows SmartScreen will give a warning once; click More info then Run anyway to proceed.

For the screen recording feature, you need to install ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg on macOS, winget install ffmpeg on Windows). All other features work right away without anything additional.

DIFFERENTIATING FEATURES

Truly free, no trial version, no feature limits, no accounts. Open source under the MIT license, so anyone can read the complete code, build, or modify it as they wish.

No network connection in the app. No accounts, no telemetry, no usage statistics. Screenshots are stored in a folder on your device and don't go anywhere else.

Vietnamese OCR runs offline using macOS's own engine — this is a feature that most similar tools either lack or require you to upload images to their servers.
The app is built with Tauri v2 and Rust, so the download is only 16 MB, not several hundred MB like apps built on Electron.

Source code: https://github.com/anhdq1801/capture-studio

Download: https://github.com/anhdq1801/capture-studio/releases/latest