Redact screenshots on Mac without uploading them

There are four common ways to take something private out of a screenshot on a Mac. They are not equally safe.

A redaction tool that uploads your image to blur it is a contradiction. If the private detail has to travel to a server so something can paint over it, you have already shared the thing you were hiding, and now there is a copy of the unredacted original on someone else's machine. I have unpacked what actually happens when you redact a screenshot online in its own guide, but the short version is that the only version that should ever leave your Mac is the one you have already cleaned. And while you are thinking about what the file gives away, it is worth knowing what metadata a Mac screenshot carries; less than people fear, but the filename alone says more than you would expect.

This is the reason ScrubShot does everything locally. Capturing, scrubbing, marking up and saving all happen on your machine; nothing is sent anywhere to be processed. You can read exactly what it does, and does not, send on the privacy page.

The safest redaction is the one that cannot be undone. That rules out two of the popular options in their casual form. The full anatomy of the recovery attacks, including what AI enhancement actually gets back, is in whether pixelation can be reversed.

• A solid box drawn in Markup looks final, but it is a separate layer sitting on top of the image. Saved in the wrong format, or opened in the right editor, it can be moved or deleted to reveal what is underneath.
• A light blur feels safe but is reversible. Text blurred at a low strength has been recovered before with off-the-shelf software, because the original detail is still mathematically present.
• Cropping genuinely removes pixels, which is great, but only works when the sensitive part is at the edge. Anything in the middle takes the surrounding context with it.
• Pixelating into the image replaces the original pixels with coarse blocks and writes them into the file. There is no hidden layer and no recoverable detail, which is why it is ScrubShot's default for sensitive content.

The point of a dedicated tool is to make the safe option the quick one. With ScrubShot the whole thing is a single loop:

• Press the shortcut. ScrubShot captures the screen.
• Drag over anything sensitive with the Scrub tool. It is pixelated straight into the image.
• Use the Marker to circle something, Text to label it, or Crop to trim the frame.
• Copy it to the clipboard or let it save to your Pictures folder, then paste it wherever it needs to go.

It never touches the network to do any of this, so the redaction happens in the half-second between capturing and sharing, not as a separate round trip to a website.

Most people reach for this for the same handful of reasons. If it is an API key or token sitting in a terminal, speed matters most, because the secret has to be gone before the screenshot is. If it is bank details or other personal data, what matters is that the redaction cannot be undone, and the difference between blurring and pixelating is what decides that. The same logic stretches to crypto and trading screenshots, where a balance or wallet address leaks far more than it appears to, and to covering faces in a screenshot, where the thing being protected is a person rather than a string.

Whatever the case, the fix is the same: scrub the part that should not travel, keep the part that makes the point, and share the cleaned image. If you were planning to simply crop the sensitive part out instead, it is worth knowing when that is genuinely enough and when it quietly is not. The background, the story of why I built a tool that does only this, is in why I built ScrubShot.

Where the screenshot is going matters as much as what is in it. The same rule applies whether you are pasting into Slack or Teams, posting somewhere public, filing a bug report, attaching to a Jira, GitHub or Linear issue, answering a customer support ticket, or anonymizing client work for a case study. It applies to whole professions too: HR and recruiting screens are full of other people's details, and accountants and finance teams work with client books on screen all day. If you would rather make it a standing habit than a one-off, there is a privacy-first screenshot workflow to settle into, and if you are not sure you need a separate app at all, I weigh the built-in Mac tools against ScrubShot.

I make ScrubShot, a one-person Mac app, so I write this from inside the problem rather than as a neutral survey. I will say plainly where the built-in tools are fine: if the sensitive thing is at the edge of the shot, crop it and you are done, no app required. ScrubShot earns its place when the detail is in the middle of something you need to keep, and you want the redaction baked in so it cannot be peeled back later.

ScrubShot is a Mac app. Press the shortcut, scrub out the private bits, then copy or save; the cleaned screenshot is the only version 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 →