ClaudeScreenShot

Take a screenshot. Its file path lands on your clipboard. Paste it straight into Claude Code.

Like it? Buy me a coffee ☕

ClaudeScreenShot is a free macOS menu-bar app, distributed as a free binary under the Coffee Right License.

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Contents: Why · Install · First run · The menu, item by item · The one permission · Where does my Mac save screenshots? · Formats and conversion · Troubleshooting · Uninstall · License, coffee & support

Why

When you want Claude Code to look at something on your screen, the best thing you can give it is not a pasted image — it's the path to the screenshot file. Claude reads the original file straight from disk: full resolution, zero re-encoding loss, no clipboard image mangling.

The fiddly part is getting that path. Take the screenshot, find it on the Desktop, right-click, Option-click "Copy as Pathname"… every single time.

ClaudeScreenShot removes the fiddly part. The 30-second version:

1. Press ⇧⌘4 (or ⇧⌘3) and grab your screenshot, exactly as you always do.
2. macOS saves the file; ClaudeScreenShot notices, puts the file's absolute path on your clipboard as plain text (no trailing newline — nothing auto-submits), and posts a notification: "Path copied — Cmd+V into Claude."
3. Click into your Claude Code session, press ⌘V, hit return. Claude opens the file and sees exactly what you saw.

That's the whole product. It sits in your menu bar, watches the folder your screenshots are saved to, and does nothing else — no Dock icon, no background network calls, no accounts.

And while it's built for Claude Code, the clipboard just gets a plain file path — so it works equally well with any tool that accepts file paths, from terminal commands to image editors.

Install

Option 1 — Quick install (any Mac — Intel or Apple Silicon)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/searayca/claudescreenshot/main/install.sh | bash

Installs the prebuilt universal app from the latest release — no Homebrew or Xcode needed — removes the quarantine flag, and launches it.

Option 2 — Homebrew

brew install searayca/tap/claudescreenshot

Then follow the caveats Homebrew prints to copy the app into ~/Applications and launch it.

Option 3 — Download

Grab ClaudeScreenShot-1.0.0.zip from the Releases page, unzip it, and move ClaudeScreenShot.app to /Applications or ~/Applications. The zip contains a universal binary (Intel + Apple Silicon).

Gatekeeper note: the app is not notarized, so macOS will block a normal double-click launch of a manually downloaded copy. Right-click (or Control-click) the app → Open → Open the first time; after that it launches normally. Installing via the quick-install one-liner or Homebrew avoids this entirely.

Requires: macOS 13 (Ventura) or later.

First run

The first time ClaudeScreenShot launches, a welcome dialog explains what it does and asks one question — which folder should it watch?

Three buttons, three paths:

• Use My Current Setup (the default, and the right answer for most people) — ClaudeScreenShot watches the folder macOS already saves your screenshots to (usually the Desktop; the dialog shows the detected folder). Nothing about your Mac changes.
• Create Tidy Screenshots Folder — for people whose Desktop is drowning in Screenshot 2026-… files. This creates ~/Pictures/Screenshots, tells macOS to save all future screenshots there (yes, this one changes your Mac's screenshot save location — that's its entire point, and the dialog says so plainly), and watches it.
• Choose Folder Myself… — a standard folder picker, for custom setups.

Whichever path you take, setup finishes with the app Active — your very next screenshot gets its path copied. No second step to find.

One caveat worth knowing: ClaudeScreenShot works with the file-saving screenshot shortcuts — ⇧⌘3 (whole screen) and ⇧⌘4 (selection) — because those write a file to watch. The copy-to-clipboard variants (⌃⇧⌘3 / ⌃⇧⌘4) never touch disk, so there is no file and no path. If you're a clipboard-shortcut person, switch to the plain shortcuts and let ClaudeScreenShot do the clipboard part.

The menu, item by item

Look for the small green tree in your menu bar — it's a full-color icon (not the usual monochrome template), so it's easy to spot at a glance. When the app is Paused, the tree dims and gains a slash. Hovering over the icon shows a tooltip with the current state and watched folder — and in fact every item in the menu has a hover tooltip explaining what it does before you click it.

• Active — Click to Pause / Paused — Click to Resume — the master switch. Active: each new screenshot's path is copied to your clipboard. Paused: the app does nothing and never touches your clipboard. The menu-bar icon mirrors the state (bright tree = Active, dimmed + slash = Paused).

• Watching: ~/Desktop — shows the folder currently being watched.

• Change Folder… — pick a different folder to watch. (Your Mac's actual screenshot save location is the usual choice — see Where does my Mac save screenshots?)

• Convert To: PNG ▸ — what format lands on your clipboard. The submenu offers, with a checkmark on the current choice:

  • Original (leave alone) — never convert anything; the path of exactly what macOS saved is copied, whatever the format.
  • PNG (the default) — lossless, ideal for screenshots; Claude reads it.
  • JPEG — smaller, lossy; Claude reads it.
  • TIFF — lossless but large; marked "(not readable by Claude)" in the menu.
  • HEIC — smallest files; also marked "(not readable by Claude)" — best for non-Claude workflows.

  When a new screenshot's format differs from your chosen target, the app writes a converted copy next to the original (the original is never modified or deleted) and copies the converted file's path. Same format? Copied as-is. Details in Formats and conversion.

• Last Screenshot: <filename> — the app remembers the most recent screenshot it processed (one back, no history beyond that):

  • Copy Path Again — puts the last path back on the clipboard. Perfect for when you copied something else over it before pasting.
  • Switch Clipboard to Original (HEIC) / Switch Clipboard to Converted PNG — appears only when the last screenshot was converted. It toggles which of the two paths is on your clipboard: the Claude-friendly converted copy, or the untouched original. The label always tells you which way it will switch. Why you'd want this: to paste the full-fidelity original into GIMP or another image editor that reads HEIC/TIFF natively, instead of the converted copy. (More in Formats and conversion.)

• Start at Login — launch ClaudeScreenShot automatically when you log in. Toggling it on registers a standard login item, visible under System Settings → General → Login Items like any other.

• About ClaudeScreenShot… — version, license, coffee link, and support contact.

• Quit ClaudeScreenShot — quits the app completely (the menu-bar icon disappears; relaunch from Applications or Spotlight).

The one permission

ClaudeScreenShot needs exactly one permission: permission to read the folder it watches. The first time it reads a protected folder (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, …), macOS shows its standard folder-access prompt:

Click Allow. That's it — there is nothing else to grant. The app needs to see new screenshot files appear in that folder; it can't do its job without this.

If you clicked Don't Allow (or want to change your mind later), open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files and Folders → ClaudeScreenShot and switch the folder back on, then toggle the app to Paused and back to Active (or relaunch it).

Where does my Mac save screenshots?

By default, macOS saves screenshots to the Desktop as Screenshot <date> at <time>.png. ClaudeScreenShot's first-run default ("Use My Current Setup") detects and uses whatever your Mac is actually set to.

To check or change the system save location yourself:

• The friendly way: press ⇧⌘5 to open the Screenshot toolbar, click Options — the "Save to" section shows the current destination and lets you change it.

• The terminal way:

  defaults read com.apple.screencapture location   # where they go now

If you change the system save location, tell ClaudeScreenShot via Change Folder… so the two stay in sync — the app watches its configured folder, not the system setting. (The "Create Tidy Screenshots Folder" first-run option sets both at once.)

Formats and conversion

Claude can read PNG and JPEG image files; it cannot read HEIC or TIFF. macOS screenshots are PNG out of the box, but Macs can be configured to save screenshots in other formats — and files dropped into the watched folder can be anything.

ClaudeScreenShot's rule, driven by the Convert To setting:

• If the new screenshot already matches your target format, its path is copied as-is — no conversion, no extra files.
• If it doesn't match, a converted copy is written next to the original (e.g. shot.heic → shot.heic.png) and the converted copy's path is copied. The original file is never modified, moved, or deleted — it stays on disk indefinitely.
• Original (leave alone) opts out of conversion entirely: the saved file's path is copied untouched, whatever the format. Choose this and an HEIC screenshot will land on your clipboard as an HEIC path — you've opted out of the Claude-readability safety net, which is exactly what you asked for.
• No resizing, no recompression of files already in a Claude-readable format. PNG stays pixel-for-pixel what macOS captured.

Getting the original back. Because the original always survives conversion, the Last Screenshot menu section gives you both paths: Copy Path Again re-copies whatever was copied last, and the Switch Clipboard to… toggle swaps between the converted copy and the untouched original. Typical use: your Mac saves HEIC screenshots, the PNG copy goes to Claude — but for retouching you switch the clipboard to the original HEIC and paste that path into GIMP, Pixelmator, or any image editor that reads HEIC natively, at full original fidelity.

Troubleshooting

Nothing gets copied when I take a screenshot. Check, in order:

1. Is the app Active? Open the menu — the top item should read "Active — Click to Pause". A dimmed tree with a slash means Paused.
2. Is it watching the right folder? Compare the menu's "Watching:" line with where your screenshots actually land (defaults read com.apple.screencapture location, or just look where the files appear). Fix with Change Folder….
3. Did the folder permission get denied? System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files and Folders → ClaudeScreenShot — the watched folder must be enabled. (See The one permission.)
4. Are you using a copy-to-clipboard shortcut? ⌃⇧⌘3/⌃⇧⌘4 never write a file, so there is nothing to detect. Use ⇧⌘3/⇧⌘4.

I got a notification but the clipboard has something else. Something copied over it after the screenshot (clipboard managers can do this). Open the menu and click Copy Path Again.

Double notifications / the same screenshot processed twice. The app debounces on file path + modification time, so true double-fires shouldn't happen. If you see one, grab the log (below) and email it over.

Old screenshots aren't picked up. By design — files older than ~60 seconds are ignored, so pre-existing images in the folder never hijack your clipboard. Only fresh screenshots count.

The log. ClaudeScreenShot writes a plain-text activity log to:

~/Library/Logs/ClaudeScreenShot.log

Every copied path, conversion, skip, and warning is in there. When reporting a problem, the last ~20 lines are usually all that's needed:

tail -20 ~/Library/Logs/ClaudeScreenShot.log

Uninstall

One-liner — stops the app, removes ClaudeScreenShot.app from /Applications and ~/Applications, and removes its saved settings:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/searayca/claudescreenshot/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --uninstall

Installed with Homebrew? Use:

brew uninstall claudescreenshot

Or by hand:

1. Quit ClaudeScreenShot from its menu (untick Start at Login first, or remove it later under System Settings → General → Login Items).

2. Delete ClaudeScreenShot.app from your Applications folder.

3. Remove the saved settings and log:

   defaults delete com.ames.claudescreenshot
   rm -f ~/Library/Logs/ClaudeScreenShot.log

Your screenshots and any converted copies are ordinary files in your screenshot folder — the uninstaller never touches them.

License, coffee & support

ClaudeScreenShot is free, released under the Coffee Right License — if it saves you time or makes you smile, you're invited (never required) to buy Greg a coffee ☕. See LICENSE for the full text.

Questions, bug reports, and ideas are welcome:

• Open an issue on GitHub Issues
• Or email claudescreenshot@ac44.com

Not affiliated with Anthropic. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC.

Copyright © 2025-2026 Greg Ames.