Two weeks ago, Screenshots started shipping with the ability to draw on and re-crop shots. Keep an eye out for the little edit icon on the top-right corner of your ‘My Shots’ page.

The My Shots UI with the link to annotations options in the top-right corner

Why Annotations?

For a while, we’ve been getting feature requests for drawing, marking up and particularly, censoring sensitive information on shots, primarily because most people take screenshots for the purpose of sharing them. While annotations won’t give you a full-blown suite of editing tools, there’s a lot you can accomplish when it comes to the simple tasks.

What can you do?

We’re keeping it simple. The new annotations feature ships with a freehand drawing tool and a highlighter (that can double up as a redaction tool). We’ve also added the ability to re-crop shots after they’ve been taken. Saving a shot after editing overwrites the original shot entirely.

Highlight important information

Create freehand drawings

Re-crop your shots

Post-launch numbers

The dashboard showing the number of people using the annotations feature

Since we launched, a little over 6% of Screenshots users have used annotations. How do the new tools compare to each other? Cropping seems to be most popular, followed by highlighting/redaction and freehand drawing.

The number of events per annotation option, with cropping the most popular

What’s next?

We want to add more annotation tools like undo and redo. We’re also open to new feature requests, which you can file on GitHub. As always, contributions are more than welcome.