A fast, bloat-free screenshot tool for Windows.
Full-featured Greenshot replacement — no plugins, no cloud, no telemetry.

Greenshot is great, but it ships with a dozen cloud upload plugins, enterprise integrations, OAuth infrastructure, and a full .NET plugin loading system that most people never use. SwiftShot strips all of that out and focuses on what matters: capturing screenshots fast, annotating them, and getting back to work.

• PrintScreen Menu — press PrintScreen and pick any mode from a popup
• Region Capture — drag to select with smart edge snapping to window borders
• Freehand Region — draw any arbitrary shape
• Window Capture — click any window with Greenshot-exact behavior (animated highlight, PgUp/PgDown to walk the window hierarchy)
• Fullscreen / Per-Monitor — capture one monitor or all of them
• Last Region — re-capture the same area instantly
• Scrolling Capture — auto-scroll and stitch an entire scrollable window into one tall image
• OCR Region — select an area and extract text using Windows built-in OCR or Tesseract
• Timed Capture — select your region first, then a countdown gives you time to hover tooltips, open menus, or interact with the screen before the shot fires

A full layer-based editor opens after every capture (configurable) — closer to a lightweight Photoshop than a markup bar.

• Layers — reorder, group, blend modes, per-layer opacity, layer masks, and non-destructive layer effects (drop shadow, glow, bevel, stroke, color/gradient overlay)
• Selection — rectangular/elliptical marquee, lasso, magnetic lasso, magic wand, select-by-color, Quick Mask, feather/expand/contract
• Paint & retouch — brush/pencil/spray/eraser with soft brushes, clone stamp, healing, dodge/burn/sponge/smudge, red-eye removal, content-aware fill, gradient and pattern fills
• Shapes & text — rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows, polygons, stars, multi-line text with font picker, sticky notes
• Transform — move, crop with aspect presets, free transform, perspective, warp (move/grow/shrink/swirl), rotate/flip, resize
• Adjust & filter — brightness/contrast, levels, curves, HSL, vibrance, gamma, threshold, blurs (gaussian/box/motion), sharpen, artistic filters
• Workflow — undo history panel, guides and rulers, navigator, command palette, .swiftshot project files that preserve layers and masks, export to PNG/JPEG/WebP/BMP/TIFF, copy to clipboard, pin to desktop, OCR from the editor, unsaved-changes protection, and atomic crash-recovery journals with a restore/discard preview on the next launch

Pin any screenshot as an always-on-top borderless floating window. Drag to reposition, scroll to resize, right-click for opacity controls. Open as many as you want.

A SQLite-backed thumbnail panel of recent captures with duplicate detection, thumbnail caching, date/filename/OCR search, and quick actions: re-open in editor, copy to clipboard, pin to desktop, or delete. Startup runs a bounded database health check; a damaged index is quarantined and rebuilt from the untouched capture files with a visible notice. Auto-OCR indexing can be enabled in Advanced settings.

Monitors the clipboard and auto-opens the editor when a new image is copied from any application.

All shortcuts are remappable through Settings with a live key recorder — click the field, press your combo, done.

OCR, freehand, and scrolling capture can also be bound to custom hotkeys.

Press Space during region selection to switch to window mode (and vice versa) without restarting the capture.

Choose the Catppuccin Mocha dark theme or the light theme. When Windows High Contrast is enabled, SwiftShot uses the live system palette instead of overriding the user's colors. Editor controls, layer state, pins, countdown cancellation, and region selection expose keyboard and assistive-technology paths with visible focus.

git clone https://github.com/SysAdminDoc/SwiftShot.git
cd SwiftShot
py -3.12 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
py -3.12 App\main.py

Requirements: CPython 3.12.x and Windows 10/11. Other Python versions exit before loading the GUI with the exact command needed to use 3.12.

Commands in this README run from the repository root. From App\, the equivalent launch and build commands are py -3.12 main.py and .\Build-SwiftShot.ps1.

Download SwiftShot-Portable.exe from Releases. Single file, no install, no Python needed. Run from anywhere.

Download SwiftShot-Setup.exe from Releases. Includes Start Menu shortcut, optional auto-start, and a proper uninstaller in Add/Remove Programs.

The build script creates both a portable .exe and a Windows installer. It selects CPython 3.12 through the Windows launcher (even if another python is first on PATH) and recreates an older build virtual environment automatically.

# Full build (portable + installer)
.\App\Build-SwiftShot.ps1

# Portable only (no Inno Setup required)
.\App\Build-SwiftShot.ps1 -PortableOnly

# Clean rebuild
.\App\Build-SwiftShot.ps1 -Clean

# Debug build (console window visible)
.\App\Build-SwiftShot.ps1 -Clean -DebugBuild

The script will:

1. Verify CPython 3.12.x and Inno Setup 6 (optional)
2. Create an isolated build venv with PyInstaller and stage the official, SHA3-verified SQLite 3.53.3 Windows runtime
3. Generate multi-resolution icon from source
4. Build and SQLite-version-probe SwiftShot-Portable.exe (single file)
5. Build and probe SwiftShot-Setup.exe via Inno Setup (if available)

Both outputs are fully self-contained — no Python or runtime needed on end-user machines.

Inno Setup is only needed for the installer build. Get it free from jrsoftware.org. Portable builds work without it.

Settings are stored in %APPDATA%\SwiftShot\swiftshot.json. Access them from the tray icon menu or within the editor.

Available tabs: General, Capture, Hotkeys, Output, Editor, Frame, Advanced. Every tab scrolls to fit the current work area and text scale. Search matches setting labels and help text, then opens the owning tab and focuses the real control. The Frame tab adds a border, drop shadow, rounded corners, and an optional padded solid/gradient backdrop behind every capture.

Notable settings include an ordered post-capture workflow (editor / save / clipboard), dark/light theme, beautification presets, output format (PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, lossless WebP, or AVIF where supported), filename pattern, timed capture duration, clipboard watcher, and launch-at-startup. Filename patterns support {YYYY}, {MM}, {DD}, {hh}, {mm}, {ss}, {app}, {title}, {user}, {counter}, {w}, and {h}.

Settings can be exported/imported as JSON and reset to defaults at any time.

Enable the timer checkbox in the capture menu or in Settings > Capture. The workflow is:

1. Press PrintScreen and select your region or window as usual
2. The overlay closes and a countdown begins (1–30 seconds, configurable)
3. Interact with the screen — hover tooltips, open context menus, type into fields
4. When the timer ends, SwiftShot takes a fresh screenshot of that exact region

This is designed for capturing UI elements that require manual interaction, like dropdown menus, hover states, or drag operations.

SwiftShot doubles as a scriptable capture tool. With any capture flag it runs headless and exits without the tray:

py -3.12 App\main.py --region 0,0,800,600 --out shot.png
py -3.12 App\main.py --fullscreen --out desktop.png
py -3.12 App\main.py --monitor 1 --out screen1.png
py -3.12 App\main.py --region 0,0,800,600 --ocr
py -3.12 App\main.py --diagnostics

--out picks the format from the file extension (png/jpg/webp/avif/bmp/tiff). --ocr can be combined with --out. Without capture flags — or with a bare image path — SwiftShot launches its tray application as usual. Release builds accept the same arguments through SwiftShot.exe.

Application modules live under App/:

main.py                 Tray/headless entry point, logging, crash handler
runtime_contract.py     Python-version and physical-pixel DPI policy
app_control.py          Local installer shutdown handshake
cli.py                  Scriptable headless capture (argparse)
app.py                  System tray, hotkey management, capture orchestration
capture.py              Screenshot engine (Win32 GDI + Qt fallback)
overlay.py              Region selector with edge snapping
window_picker.py        Window capture with animated highlight
editor.py               Layer-based image editor (8,500+ lines)
layers.py               Layer/group/history data model
config.py               JSON settings with backup, import/export
settings_dialog.py      Preferences UI with hotkey recorder
hotkeys.py              WH_KEYBOARD_LL global keyboard hook
capture_menu.py         PrintScreen popup menu with timer controls
ocr.py                  Windows WinRT OCR + Tesseract fallback
ocr_dialog.py           OCR result display
theme.py                Catppuccin Mocha dark theme
monitor_picker.py       Multi-monitor selection dialog
pin_window.py           Always-on-top floating screenshot windows
capture_history.py      Recent captures thumbnail panel
countdown_overlay.py    Animated countdown timer overlay
scrolling_capture.py    Auto-scroll and stitch capture
safe_io.py              Bounded image/project input validation
diagnostics.py          Local support-bundle generation
recovery.py             Atomic dirty-document journals and recovery discovery
updater.py              GitHub release update checker
logger.py               Rotating file logger
utils.py                Virtual geometry, color helpers, startup registry
generate_icon.py        Programmatic icon generation for builds

28 Python modules — 18,000+ lines of code — no capture upload service.

That's the core runtime. OCR uses the Windows built-in WinRT engine (no Python package needed) with an optional local Tesseract + pytesseract fallback. Background removal is also optional and requires rembg; its upstream package downloads a model on first use unless that model is already present in its cache.

When Check for updates is enabled (the default), startup sends one HTTPS GET to the GitHub Releases API for version metadata. Disable it in Settings > Advanced for fully offline core operation. SwiftShot sends no screenshot, clipboard, OCR, history, or configuration content. The optional rembg first-use model download described above is controlled by that separately installed package.

py -3.12 -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
py -3.12 -m pytest

GPL-3.0