How to anonymize client screenshots for case studies and demos

When you are writing up a case study or putting a portfolio piece together, the instinct is to clean everything up first: build a tidy mock-up, fill it with round numbers, make it look designed. It is the wrong instinct. A real screenshot of the actual product, doing the actual job, with real volume and the messy edge cases a mock-up would never bother to draw, is far more convincing than anything you could stage.

The problem is that the real screenshot is full of things that are not yours to publish. The client’s name is across the top, real people are listed in a table, there are figures that are nobody’s business, and account IDs that tie the whole thing to one identifiable company. You cannot ship that as-is, and you should not flatten it into a fake to avoid the issue. You anonymize it: keep the realism, remove the identity. If real people appear in the frame, profile photos in a user table, a team page, a call grid, covering the faces is part of the same job.

Before a client screenshot goes anywhere public, run your eye across the frame for anything that ties it to a real company or a real person:

• The client or company name: in the header, the page title, breadcrumbs, the browser tab, account menus and any “welcome back” greeting.
• Real people’s names: staff, contacts and anyone listed in a table of users, comments or activity.
• Real financial figures: revenue, invoice totals, balances, anything that reveals what the client actually makes or spends.
• Customer and user records: rows of real customers, emails, phone numbers or addresses, often the bulk of the screen.
• Account, order and reference IDs: the long codes that uniquely identify the account or a transaction.
• The logo, when the brand is recognizable enough that the name being scrubbed does not actually hide who it is.

A lot of this overlaps with the personal-data side of things, so it is worth reading the rundown on hiding bank details and personal information in screenshots as well, the same row of a table can hold both the client’s figures and a real customer’s details.

There are two clean ways to do this, and they suit different shots. If the identifying parts are scattered through the frame, a name up top, figures in the middle, IDs down the side, pixelate each one in place. Drag over the value and it is rewritten straight into the image, so the rest of the layout stays exactly as it was.

If the sensitive part happens to sit at the edge of the frame, you can crop it out instead and never include it at all. That works beautifully when, say, the client logo is in a top corner, or the account name is the last column on the right and nothing you want to show is beside it. Cropping genuinely removes those pixels, so there is nothing left to recover. The catch is that most identifying data is not conveniently at the edge, it is woven through the content you actually want to demonstrate, so cropping it away usually means cutting out the very thing the screenshot was meant to prove. When that is the case, scrub it in place. The trade-offs between covering a region and cutting it away are laid out in the guide to redacting screenshots on a Mac without uploading them.

The reason anonymized screenshots often look fake is that people scrub too much. They drop a giant box over half the dashboard, and now it could be anything, there is nothing left to be convinced by. The whole point of using a real screenshot was the realism, and an over-redacted one throws that away.

The fix is to scrub the value and keep the shape. Pixelate just the name, just the figure, just the ID, and leave the table structure, the column count, the volume of rows and the general busyness of the screen completely intact. The reader can still see that this is a real product handling a real workload, they just cannot read the parts that say who it belongs to. A pixelated cell in a table of forty rows is far more convincing than a blank rectangle, because the reader trusts what they can still see.

In ScrubShot this is one short loop: press the shortcut to capture the screen, drag the Scrub tool over each name, figure and ID to pixelate it into the image, then copy it to the clipboard or save it to your Pictures folder. The Scrub tool rewrites the underlying pixels, so a scrubbed value cannot be lifted back off later, and there is Undo if you cover the wrong thing. None of it touches the network, so the only version that leaves your Mac is the anonymized one.

One practical step people skip: ask the client before you publish, even with everything anonymized. I am not making a legal point here, just a sensible, relationship-preserving one. A client who finds their work in your portfolio without warning, however well scrubbed, can feel blindsided, and that is a cost you do not need to pay for a case study.

Most of the time the answer is yes, and often they have a view worth hearing: a figure they would rather you did not show even anonymized, a project they are not ready to talk about publicly, or a happy surprise that they are fine being named after all. Anonymizing the screenshot protects the data. Asking first protects the relationship. Do both, and a real screenshot becomes the most convincing thing in the whole case study.

ScrubShot is a Mac app built for exactly this: press the shortcut, drag over the client name, the figures and the IDs to pixelate them into the image, then copy or save. The shape of the UI stays intact, so the screenshot still looks real, and the anonymized version is the only one that ever leaves your Mac. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once.

Try ScrubShot free →