TL;DR
- Clipy's screenshot editor runs in your browser at clipy.online/screenshots — free, no watermark, no install needed for the editing itself.
- Eleven tools, each on a single-key shortcut: arrows, boxes, circles, lines, text, auto-numbered step badges, pen, highlighter, pixelated redaction, crop — and a real select tool for moving what you've drawn.
- Everything is non-destructive: the original image is kept, annotations live on a separate layer, and you can reopen a screenshot next month and move the arrow you drew today.
- Redaction is pixelation, not soft blur — a deliberate choice, because blurred text has been reversed before and mosaics destroy the detail for good.
- One click turns the finished markup into a share link anyone can open without an account.
Why annotation is the actual product
A screenshot on its own is a puzzle. It shows a whole screen and tells the viewer nothing about which of its five hundred visible elements you mean. So we compensate with prose: "in the screenshot, if you look at the top-right area, below the avatar, there's a dropdown — not the first one…" — three sentences to do what one arrow does instantly.
Annotation is the difference between showing someone a screen and telling them something about it. An arrow says "this." A box says "this region." A numbered badge says "in this order." A pixelated block says "this part is none of your business." Once you have those four verbs, most workplace communication about anything visual gets shorter and clearer at the same time.
The catch is that annotation tools have historically lived in desktop apps you had to install, or in screenshot extensions that hold basic tools hostage to a subscription. Clipy's editor is a web page. If an image can reach your browser, you can mark it up and link it — from any machine, including one that isn't yours.
Getting an image into the editor
Three paths, all ending in the same place:
- Paste. Take a screenshot with your OS shortcut (⇧⌃⌘4 on a Mac puts it straight on the clipboard), open clipy.online/screenshots, press ⌘V. No file was ever saved to disk.
- Drag or upload. Drop a PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF (up to 15 MB) anywhere on the library page, or use the Upload button.
- Capture in Chrome. The Clipy extension screenshots the visible tab or the full scrolling page and can send the result to your library. (The extension popup has its own quick markup panel — more on how the two editors differ below.)
Uploads dump you directly into the editor, because the upload is never the point — the pointing is.
The eleven tools, and when each one wins
Arrow (A) — the workhorse
Drag from where the viewer's eye starts to the thing that matters. If you use one annotation tool all year, it's this one. Arrows in Clipy are first-class shapes: after drawing, press V and you can grab either endpoint and reposition it — no undo-and-redraw when your aim was two pixels off.
Box (R) and Circle (O) — "this region, right here"
Boxes are for rectangular things: a form field, an error banner, a table row. Circles (ellipses, really) read as softer and work better on irregular targets — a word in a paragraph, an icon in a cluster. Both come in three stroke weights; use Thick when the screenshot will be viewed small in a chat preview.
Text (T) — label, don't narrate
Click where the words go, type, then ⌘↵ (or click away) to place it. Double-click any existing text to edit it later. The craft here is restraint: text on an image should be a label — "wrong total", "expected state", "pick this one" — not a paragraph. If you're writing sentences on a screenshot, that content belongs in the message you send with the link.
Numbered steps (N) — the repro-steps machine
This is the sleeper feature. Click to drop badge ①, click again for ②, and so on. Delete a step in the middle and the others renumber automatically — no manual re-labeling when you realize step 2 was unnecessary.
Anyone who writes bug reports knows the drill: "Steps to reproduce: 1) Open settings, 2) Click Integrations, 3) Toggle the webhook off and on." With numbered badges you put the 1-2-3 directly on the interface, and the prose shrinks to one line per step or disappears entirely. Same for onboarding docs, support macros, and how-to guides. Pair it with our guide on writing bug reports developers can act on — and when the sequence is too long for stills, record it once and let the recording write the SOP.
Pen (P) and Highlighter (H) — freehand, when shapes are too formal
The pen draws freehand strokes for circling weird shapes or scribbling a quick connection between two areas. The highlighter lays down wide, translucent strokes that read exactly like marker on paper — the text underneath stays legible. It's the right tool for emphasizing a line in a log file or a sentence in a settings page without covering it.
Line (L) — clean underlines and dividers
A straight segment without an arrowhead. Underline a value, strike through the wrong option, draw a boundary. Small tool, no surprises.
Redact (B) — pixelation, because blur can be reversed
Drag a rectangle over anything that shouldn't leave the building — emails, customer names, tokens, revenue numbers — and Clipy replaces it with a chunky mosaic.
The implementation detail worth knowing: this is pixelation, not gaussian blur, and that's a security decision, not an aesthetic one. A soft blur preserves a lot of the underlying signal, and blurred text has been successfully reconstructed by deblurring tools more than once. Clipy's redaction downsamples the actual painted pixels into large blocks — the detail is destroyed, not smoothed — so it survives re-encoding and holds up far better against the reconstruction tricks that have unmasked soft-blurred text. The block size scales with the redacted area and never drops below a floor, so neither a huge nor a tiny redaction ends up readable.
One workflow note: redact before you share, obviously — but because Clipy's editing is non-destructive for you as the owner, you can also crop or annotate around a redaction later without ever re-exposing what's underneath in the shared image.
Crop (C) — non-destructive framing
Drag the region you want to keep. The crop applies to the shared and exported image, but it's stored as part of your annotation layer — reopen the editor and the full original is still there, so you can widen the crop back out next week. A subtle correctness detail: annotations render before the crop is applied, so a redaction that overhangs the crop edge still fully covers the pixels that survive. There's no way to leak half a secret through clever cropping.
Select (V) — the tool that makes it an editor
Click any shape to move it, grab endpoints to reshape it, press Delete to remove it. This sounds basic; most quick-markup tools don't have it — they're paint apps where every stroke is instantly baked. Select is what turns markup from "commit immediately" into "arrange until right."
The part that actually matters: nothing is ever baked in
Here's the design decision that separates Clipy's editor from popup markup panels: the annotated image and the original image are stored separately, forever.
The first time you save an edit, Clipy preserves the pristine capture and stores your shapes as structured data layered on top. What viewers see at your share link is the flattened result. What you see, when you reopen the editor, is your original screenshot with every arrow, box, and label still live and movable. The interface says it in one line: "Annotations stay editable — the original is kept."
Practically, that means:
- You can fix instead of redo. Wrong color, misplaced arrow, typo in a label — select, adjust, save. The share link updates in place.
- Annotations can evolve. A support screenshot can gain a second arrow when the customer asks a follow-up. A design markup can drop resolved notes as fixes land.
- Undo has real depth while you work — ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z walk the full history of a session, and Escape cancels an in-progress text label or crop and clears the selection.
Every save keeps the link stable: clipy.online/s/<id> always shows the latest version. Copy and Download export the same flattened PNG the link shows, so there's exactly one version of the truth.
The extension's quick markup vs. the web editor
Clipy actually has two annotation surfaces, and it's worth knowing which you're in:
- The extension popup panel appears right after you capture a tab in Chrome. It's built for speed: pen, arrow, box, blur, and crop, in one color, with copy/download/share as the outputs. Its blur is a true soft blur, and when you hit Share the marked-up image is what uploads — the popup's ink is part of the shared pixels.
- The web editor — the one this post is about — is the full instrument: all eleven tools, color and stroke choices, undo/redo, and the non-destructive layer system. Anything in your library, including screenshots captured with the extension, opens in it via the Edit button; new annotations you add on the web stay editable from then on.
Rule of thumb: quick "look at this" markup at capture time in the popup; anything you might need to revise, or anything with redaction where you want pixelation's stronger guarantees, in the web editor.
A concrete recipe: the two-minute bug report
- Capture the broken state — extension for a Chrome tab, OS shortcut + ⌘V paste for anything else.
- Box (R) the error message or wrong value. Thick stroke, red.
- Arrow (A) from empty space to the control that triggered it.
- Number the steps (N) on the UI in the order you clicked them.
- Redact (B) anything customer-identifying.
- Text (T): one label with the expected value, e.g. "should say $49".
- Save, copy the link, paste it into the ticket.
The engineer who opens it sees what broke, where, in what order, with nothing sensitive attached — and if they ask "what did you expect instead?", you edit the answer onto the same link instead of re-capturing. When the bug only reproduces in motion, escalate from stills to a 30-second screen recording — same account, same library, same link-first workflow. More patterns in our roundup of free bug reporting tools.
What the editor doesn't do (yet)
Honesty section, so you can pick the right tool:
- No OCR or text extraction — the editor works with pixels, it doesn't read them.
- No stickers, emoji stamps, or device frames. The toolset is deliberately the communication-first ten-plus-crop, not a design suite.
- Exports are PNG. GIFs can be uploaded and shared, but annotation output is a still PNG.
- No mobile capture apps. The editor itself is a web page and the library accepts uploads from anywhere, but capture tooling is Chrome-extension territory today.
Generous working room within those lines: up to 250 shapes per screenshot, images up to 15 MB and 32 megapixels, 500 screenshots and 1 GB per account — all free, all watermark-free, per the Clipy pledge.
FAQ
Is Clipy's screenshot editor really free?
Yes — every tool, with no watermark and no trial timer. You sign in with Google so your screenshots live in a library you can edit and delete from; that's the only requirement.
Can I annotate a screenshot without installing anything?
Yes. The editor is a web page: go to clipy.online/screenshots, paste or upload an image, and mark it up. The Chrome extension is only needed if you want in-browser capture (including full-page capture).
Does the redaction actually protect sensitive info?
The web editor's Redact tool pixelates — it destroys the underlying detail rather than smoothing it, which is meaningfully harder to reverse than a soft blur. The shared image only ever contains the flattened result, and your kept original is visible to you alone.
Can I change annotations after sharing the link?
Yes. Annotations are stored as an editable layer and the original image is preserved, so you can move, restyle, or delete any shape later — the share link updates in place when you save.
What are the keyboard shortcuts?
V select · A arrow · O circle · R box · T text · N numbered step · P pen · H highlighter · L line · B redact · C crop — plus ⌘Z undo, ⇧⌘Z redo, Delete to remove a selected shape, Escape to cancel, and ⌘↵ to commit text.
How do I share the finished screenshot?
Save, then copy the clipy.online/s/… link from the share page — viewers need no account. The full sharing story (unlisted links, social previews, the library) is covered in our screenshot sharing guide.
Start with the screenshot you already have
There's probably one on your clipboard right now. Open clipy.online/screenshots, press ⌘V, and give the arrow tool ten seconds. The first time you fix an annotation after sending the link — instead of re-capturing, re-editing, and re-sending — the whole approach clicks.
