Clowd

Clowd is a minimalist screen capture / screen recording tool. It sits out of your way in your system tray, and is activated when you press the PrntScr key.

• Region capture as a fast, zoomable PrntScr replacement
• Video recording to MKV, MP4, or GIF, with speaker and microphone audio
• Scrolling capture to grab a whole page or document as one tall image
• Text recognition to copy, search, or share the text out of anything on screen
• Image editor for quick annotations and edits
• Upload anything to a variety of file sharing websites, with the URL copied to your clipboard
• Accelerated uploads - share the link immediately, before the upload has finished
• Color picker that can sample any pixel on screen
• Window detection - selections snap to window borders
• Fully keyboard accessible
• Global hotkeys, configurable in settings
• Lives in the system tray and stays out of your way
• Automatic updates, with opt-in experimental builds

The latest stable release can always be downloaded below. Installed builds keep themselves up to date automatically; experimental (pre-release) builds can be opted into via the app settings.

I will respond to bug reports or questions in GitHub issues. Also feel free to bug me (@caesay) in the Clowd Discord server:

• Uses Direct3D so is super fast and responsive
• Scroll to zoom in on any part of your screen, pixel perfect selections (or just looking at stuff on your screen closely)
• Fully keyboard accessibly
• Snaps selection to window borders
• Click on any window to quickly bring it to the foreground
• Select any color to open a color picker
• Don't use one of the buttons? Switch UPLOAD, SCROLL or OCR off under Settings → Capture → Optional features and the capture window drops them

• Record MKV, MP4, or GIF's easily
• Capture Speaker and Microphone audio
• Optionally show animation where mouse was clicked

Windows only.

Some things don't fit on screen — a long article, a chat history, a settings page. Scrolling capture takes the picture anyway.

• Select a region, press L (SCROLL), then click the part of the screen the wheel should scroll
• Clowd drives the scrolling for you, photographs each step, and stitches them into a single tall image that opens in the editor like any other capture
• You get the whole page, not just the part you could see. The target is wound back to the top before the capture starts, so it doesn't matter where you were scrolled to. Turn this off with Settings → Capture → Optional features → Scroll to top first when you want to capture from where you are
• Sticky headers and toolbars appear once, not repeated down the length of the image
• It stops on its own when it reaches the end of the document. Esc or FINISH ends it early and keeps everything captured so far; CANCEL throws it away
• Take your mouse back whenever you like. Moving the cursor pauses the capture rather than ruining it; put it down again and the capture resumes where it left off
• Works on a window that is behind other windows — Clowd brings the one you selected to the front and makes sure it is the one being photographed

A capture is capped at 120 frames, 20,000 pixels tall, or two minutes, whichever comes first. Scrolling a pane inside a window (a sidebar, a chat column) is not supported yet — for now, aim it at something that scrolls as a whole window.

Select any region and press O to read the text inside it — including text in screenshots, videos, error dialogs, and other places you can't select text normally.

• Runs entirely on your machine. The recognition models are built into Clowd, so there is no cloud service, no network round trip, no API key, and no language pack to install
• You see what it read. The recognised lines lift off the frozen screenshot as text, so you can check the result before doing anything with it
• Then C copies it, S searches the web for it, U uploads it as a text paste with the link on your clipboard, and B takes you back to the normal capture buttons
• Handles the text that usually defeats built-in OCR — small type, dark mode, low contrast
• Everything inside the selection is read, so select tighter to read less

• Minimalistic / Easy-To-Learn UI for quick edits
• Save and return to recent seessions
• Copy to Clipboard or Upload to the web in one click
• Pin the editor above every other window, so a capture stays visible while you work

• Can upload any file or screenshot from PC with one click
• URL is copied to clipboard
• Supports a vareity of file sharing websites

Uploading a large file to your own cloud storage normally means waiting for the whole transfer to finish before you have anything to share. Accelerated uploads remove that wait.

• The link is ready instantly. Clowd copies a shareable URL to your clipboard the moment the upload starts, not when it finishes.
• Recipients don't wait either. Anyone who opens the link starts downloading right away — the bytes stream through to them as they arrive, so they can begin watching a video or viewing an image while you are still uploading it.
• Your files still land in your own storage. The transfer is relayed to your bucket in the background. Once it completes the link simply redirects there, so nothing stays in the middle.

Enable it with the ⚡ toggle next to any provider on the Upload settings page. It is available for the providers that upload to storage you own — Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3 (and S3-compatible services), Cloudflare R2, and Backblaze B2 — and is on by default for those. Turn it off to upload directly to your storage as usual.

• Select any color on screen using the PrntScr Screen Capture. Press 'H' when your cursor is over the desired color.
• Can also open the color picker from the tray icon.

Interested in building Clowd from source? See BUILDING.md.