TL;DR

  • Screenshot attachments die in chat scrollback. A link is permanent, always current, and opens for anyone — no account, no app, no download.
  • Clipy now does screenshots end to end: capture in Chrome (visible area or full-page scroll capture), or paste any image into clipy.online/screenshots with ⌘V.
  • Every upload lands straight in an annotation editor — arrows, boxes, text, numbered steps, pixelated redaction — then one click gives you a share link like clipy.online/s/DTSx0WAIFvBi.
  • Links are unlisted: anyone with the URL can view, search engines are told to stay out, and deleting the screenshot kills the image everywhere.
  • It's free. No watermark, no plan gate, no trial clock — 500 screenshots and 1 GB of storage on every account.
Animated demo: uploading a screenshot to Clipy, annotating it with an arrow, box, text and pixelated redaction, then sharing it as a link
The whole flow: upload → annotate → save → share link. About fifteen seconds of actual work.

The problem with how you share screenshots now

Think about the last screenshot you sent someone. You probably hit a system shortcut, found the file in a folder or on your clipboard, dragged it into Slack or an email, and moved on. It worked — sort of. Here's what actually happened to that image:

  • It became unfindable in about a day. Chat scrollback is where screenshots go to die. Two weeks later someone asks "where's that screenshot of the billing error?" and the answer is fifteen minutes of scrolling.
  • It got compressed. Many chat apps recompress the inline preview. The crisp 2× capture of an error message arrives as a soft, artifacted approximation — sometimes genuinely unreadable at the exact spot that mattered.
  • It carried no context. A raw screenshot doesn't say what to look at. So you followed it with three sentences of "see the red button in the top right, no not that one" — prose doing a job an arrow does better.
  • It was frozen. Spotted a typo in your annotation? Sent the wrong crop? Too late. The attachment is out. Your only move is sending a second file and hoping people notice which is current.

A share link fixes all four. The image lives at a stable URL, served at full quality. The annotations travel with it. And because the link points at the live version, fixing a mistake updates what everyone sees — no "v2_final_FINAL.png".

Two ways to get a screenshot into Clipy

Clipy's screenshot flow has two entry points, and they cover pretty much every situation: capturing something in your browser, and sharing an image you already have.

Capture in Chrome: visible area, or the entire page

The Clipy Chrome extension — the same one that does screen recording — has a "Screenshot this tab" section in its popup with two buttons:

  • Visible area grabs exactly what's on screen in the active tab, as a lossless PNG.
  • Full page scrolls the page for you and stitches every viewport into one tall image.

Full-page capture is the one that separates real tools from toy ones, because most long pages fight back. Clipy's implementation handles the annoying cases properly:

  • Sticky headers don't repeat. The extension hides position: fixed and sticky elements after the first frame, so you don't get the same navbar stamped forty times down your capture.
  • Pages that scroll inside a panel still work. Plenty of modern apps — dashboards, docs tools, chat UIs — never scroll the window at all; the scrolling happens in a nested container. Clipy detects the dominant scrollable container on screen and captures that, instead of returning one useless viewport.
  • It knows when to stop. Capture is capped at 40 viewport-heights and the output canvas at 32,000 pixels tall, so an infinite-scroll feed gives you a long, complete-enough image instead of a hung tab.
  • Your page is left how it found it. Scroll position is restored and hidden elements are re-shown when it's done.

After either capture, the popup drops you into a quick markup panel — pen, arrow, box, blur, crop — and gives you three outputs: Copy (PNG to clipboard), Download, or Share link, which uploads it to your Clipy library and hands you the URL. One honest note: capture lives in the popup — there's no keyboard shortcut for screenshots yet (the shortcuts Clipy registers are for recording). Full-page capture has its own deep dive — including the free DevTools and Firefox routes — in our full scrolling page guide.

Already have the image? Paste it

Screenshots don't only come from Chrome. macOS's ⇧⌘4, the Windows Snipping Tool, a photo someone texted you, a chart exported from a design tool — sooner or later you have an image on your clipboard or disk that needs to become a link.

Open clipy.online/screenshots and:

  • Press ⌘V. This is the killer path. An OS screenshot taken with ⇧⌃⌘4 lives on the clipboard and nowhere else — paste it straight into the library without ever saving a file.
  • Drag and drop a file anywhere on the page.
  • Click "Upload image" for a standard file picker.

Clipy accepts PNG, JPEG, WebP, and GIF, up to 15 MB per image. Whichever way the image arrives, the same thing happens next: you're redirected straight into the editor. Not to a detail page with an Edit button somewhere — into the editor, because the whole point of sharing a screenshot is usually to point at something in it first.

Annotate before you share: arrows beat paragraphs

Clipy's web screenshot editor with an arrow, box, text label and pixelated redaction applied to a captured page
The web editor: eleven tools, eight colors, three stroke weights, full undo history — and the original pixels are never touched.

The web editor gives you eleven tools, each with a single-key shortcut: select (V), arrow (A), circle (O), box (R), text (T), numbered steps (N), pen (P), highlighter (H), line (L), redact (B), and crop (C). Two of them deserve a special mention here; the full tool-by-tool guide lives in its own post.

  • Numbered steps. Click to drop badge ①, click again for ②, ③, ④. Delete step two and the rest renumber themselves. If you write repro steps in bug reports or build how-to docs, this tool replaces an entire paragraph of "then click the thing in the sidebar, then the second tab…".
  • Redact. Drag a rectangle over an email address, an API key, a customer name — Clipy pixelates it into a mosaic. It deliberately uses pixelation rather than a soft blur: the mosaic is built by destroying the underlying detail, so it survives re-encoding, whereas soft gaussian blurs on text have famously been reversed. If you share screenshots of production systems, this distinction matters.

The editor is also non-destructive, which is rarer than it should be in this category. Your annotations are stored as a layer over the original image, and the pristine capture is kept from the moment you first save. Reopen the editor next week and your arrow is still an arrow — you can move it, recolor it, or delete it, instead of finding it baked into the pixels. The UI states it plainly: "Annotations stay editable — the original is kept."

When you're done: Save changes writes the annotated version to your share link, Copy puts the flattened PNG on your clipboard, and Download saves it as a file. All three produce identical pixels, so what you paste into Slack matches what the link shows.

A shared Clipy screenshot page showing the annotated image, share URL, and Edit, Download, Open and Copy link buttons
The share page. Viewers see the image, a download button, and nothing demanding they sign up.

Every screenshot gets a short URL — https://clipy.online/s/ plus a 12-character id. Send that link anywhere and the recipient sees a clean page with the image, the title, the date, and a download button. Some details that are easy to get wrong and Clipy gets right:

  • Viewers need nothing. No account, no app, no "sign up to view full size" wall. The person you sent it to clicks and sees it. That's the entire experience.
  • Full quality, always. The page serves the actual image file from the CDN — not a recompressed preview. The Open button gives you the direct image URL when you want to embed the raw file somewhere.
  • It unfurls properly. The page ships complete Open Graph and Twitter card metadata pointing at the image itself, so pasting the link into Slack, Teams, or a PR description produces a real preview instead of a bare URL.
  • Unlisted by design. Anyone with the link can view it — that's what makes it frictionless — but the pages tell search engines not to index them, and your library is private to you. If you shared the wrong thing, deleting the screenshot removes the image from storage, so dead links go genuinely dead.
  • Editing after sharing works. The Edit button (owners only) reopens the annotation editor, and saving updates what the existing link shows. Typo in your label? Fix it; everyone who opens the link from now on sees the corrected version. No re-sending.

Being honest about the boundaries: there are no password-protected or auto-expiring screenshot links today, and no team workspaces for screenshots yet. "Unlisted" is a real security posture for day-to-day work screenshots, but if an image absolutely cannot risk being seen by an unintended holder of the URL, don't put it on any link-sharing service — Clipy included.

A library instead of a Downloads folder

The Clipy screenshots library showing screenshot cards with Edit, Copy link, Open and Delete actions
Every screenshot you've shared, with its link one click away.

Everything you upload or capture lands in your screenshots library, next to your recordings in the Clipy app. Each card shows a thumbnail, the date, an "annotated" marker when you've marked it up, and the four actions you actually need: Edit, Copy link, Open, and Delete (with a confirm step, because rage-clicking near a delete button happens). Titles are renamed inline — click the pencil, type, press Enter. Extension captures name themselves after the tab's title, which turns out to be the right default: a week later, "Stripe Dashboard — Payouts" beats "Screenshot 2026-08-12 at 9.41.17 PM" every time.

Compare that to the traditional system: a Downloads folder with thirty files named Screenshot 2026-08-12 at 9.41.17 PM.png, no idea which were sent to whom, and no way to fix any of them. A library of named, linkable, still-editable screenshots is a small thing that compounds daily.

What it costs: nothing, and that's not a teaser

Screenshots in Clipy are free, and not in the "free until you need the good parts" sense:

  • No watermark — on anything, ever. That's the standing Clipy pledge, and screenshots inherit it.
  • No plan gate. Every annotation tool, full-page capture, links, the library — none of it checks what plan you're on.
  • Real allowances: 500 screenshots and 1 GB of storage per account, 15 MB per image. For context, a typical full-page PNG runs a few hundred kilobytes to a couple of megabytes — that's years of ordinary use.
  • Viewers are always free. Nobody who opens your link is asked for anything.

You do need to sign in (Google) to create and share screenshots — links have to live in somebody's library, or you could never edit or delete them later. Viewing requires no account at all.

Bug reports. A screenshot with an arrow at the broken element, a box around the error text, and the user's email pixelated out is the difference between a ticket that gets fixed and a ticket that gets a clarifying question. Drop the link into the ticket — Slack, Teams, and most chat tools unfurl a real preview; on GitHub, grab the direct image URL from the Open button and paste it as an image. If you're building the habit, our guide on writing bug reports that get fixed pairs well with this, and when a still image isn't enough, a 30-second screen recording picks up where screenshots stop.

Design and copy feedback. Instead of "the spacing feels off near the top", send the screenshot with a box around the actual gap and a one-line text note. Feedback that points is feedback that ships.

Support, in both directions. Support agents send annotated "click here, then here" screenshots with numbered steps; customers send captures of what they're seeing. Both travel better as links — no attachment size limits, no compression, and the agent can fix an unclear annotation after sending.

Documentation and internal how-tos. Number the steps directly on the interface and you've written half the doc. For processes too long for one image, record the process once and let the recording write the SOP.

Handing context to AI agents. A screenshot link is a URL any tool can fetch — paste it into an issue an agent will read, or use the direct image URL from the Open button anywhere that accepts an image address.

How Clipy compares to the usual suspects

Versus the OS screenshot + attach ritual: the OS capture is fine — Clipy happily accepts it via ⌘V. What it replaces is everything after: hunting the file, attaching, recompressing, losing it. Capture the way you always have; share as a link.

Versus screenshot-tool extensions (Awesome Screenshot, Lightshot and friends): the mainstream ones increasingly gate basics — capture counts, editing tools, "local videos" — behind subscriptions, and a couple have had well-documented privacy incidents. Clipy's screenshot stack is free, watermark-free, and comes from the same maker as its recorder, so one extension covers both stills and video. We've written a fuller Clipy vs Awesome Screenshot comparison if you're weighing that switch.

Versus anonymous image hosts (Imgur and similar): anonymous hosts are for memes. Work screenshots need edit-after-send, deletion that actually deletes, redaction, and no ads next to your production dashboard. That's a different product category.

And when a screenshot isn't enough — when the bug only shows up when you click through three screens — that's what the screen recorder side of Clipy is for. Same account, same library, same free-with-no-watermark stance.

FAQ

Do people need a Clipy account to view my screenshot?

No. Share links open for anyone, on any device, with no sign-in and no app.

Are my screenshots public?

They're unlisted: only people who have the exact link can view them, the pages are flagged noindex so search engines stay out, and your library is visible only to you. Deleting a screenshot removes the image from storage, so old links stop working entirely.

Yes — that's one of the main reasons to use links over attachments. Open Edit, change anything, save, and the same URL now shows the updated version. Annotations stay editable because the original image is preserved underneath them.

What file types can I upload?

PNG, JPEG, WebP, and GIF, up to 15 MB each. Annotated exports are always PNG at full quality.

Is there really no watermark?

Really. No watermark on captures, downloads, or shared pages, on any plan — it's part of the Clipy pledge.

Can I capture a full scrolling page?

Yes, with the Chrome extension's "Full page" button — it auto-scrolls, hides sticky headers so they don't repeat, handles apps that scroll inside an inner panel, and stitches up to 40 viewports into one PNG.

Does Clipy work outside Chrome?

Capture-from-browser is Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers) via the extension. But the web library accepts any image from anywhere — take the screenshot with your OS tool and paste it at clipy.online/screenshots.

Try the fifteen-second version

Take any screenshot you have lying around. Go to clipy.online/screenshots, press ⌘V, drop an arrow on the thing that matters, hit Save, copy the link. That's the whole workflow — and the next time someone asks "wait, which button?", you'll answer with a URL instead of a paragraph.