This App Instantly Hides Sensitive Information From Your Mac’s Screenshots
ScreenFloat 2 ($14.99) is one of my favorite screenshot apps for Mac, offering additional features like timed screenshots and color pickers. The latest update adds one of the key privacy features I really appreciate: smart editing. The process of deleting the contents of a screenshot isn’t anything new, but the latest version of ScreenFloat automatically identifies certain types of sensitive information and helps you remove it with just a few clicks, making it a lot more convenient. Compatible information includes addresses, phone numbers, links, and email addresses. Now you can quickly delete all of these without having to manually select the areas you want to delete.
After taking a screenshot in ScreenFloat 2, the image appears in a floating window that you can now right-click to try out the new data recognition feature (on the device, so that the detected information doesn’t leave the computer). To test it out, I took a screenshot of text with several email addresses, links, dates, and phone numbers. The app easily detected all of these items and let me edit them all in one go (though I could have edited them one at a time if I’d wanted). However, while I found the feature to work fine if each item was on its own line, if you need to edit multiple items in the middle of a single sentence, the app can sometimes miss a character or two.
Redaction is much safer than blurring sensitive information in screenshots , and the ability to do it in a few clicks is a boon that actually encourages me to do it. Blurring can be undone without much trouble, but redaction works by placing a solid black rectangle over parts of your screenshot, meaning you won’t be able to decipher what’s underneath the redacted parts once you save the image. But if privacy isn’t your main concern, there are a few other features in this ScreenFloat update. My favorite is that the app now lets you take screenshots on your Mac and annotate them on your iPad. This is great for people who prefer to use an iPad with an Apple Pencil, and is enabled byApple’s new Continuity Markup support.
ScreenFloat also supports screen recordings, and this update makes editing them easier. Support for edit markers in screen recordings has been added, allowing you to track any changes you make while editing. Now, when you change audio settings, pause a recording, or switch to another app, the app automatically removes these markers to help you bookmark the edit location. You can also use the app to export screen recordings as GIFs.
There are also a few other minor improvements, such as the ability to set a custom filename format for screenshots, a new keyboard shortcut for taking a full-screen screenshot (default is double-press Command-Shift-2), and the ability to add a drop shadow effect to annotations.