English | 中文

📄 Project overview page

---

ClipboardOnly is a Screenshot Utility for Mac. A small tool born from a simple frustration: every screenshot automatically creates a file you didn't ask for. This utility gives you back control — choose whether to save a file at all, and optionally run OCR on whatever you've captured.

Features

• Clipboard-only mode — intercepts screenshots so they go straight to the clipboard instead of cluttering your Desktop.

• Auto OCR — runs Apple Vision OCR on every screenshot and copies the recognized text. Works with Chinese (Simplified / Traditional) and English.

• Privacy Filter (new in v1.1.0) — automatically detects and redacts sensitive content in both OCR text and the screenshot image itself:

  • 🟥 API Keys (OpenAI, Stripe, GitHub, AWS, Slack, Google …)
  • 🟧 Credit Card Numbers
  • 🟦 Email Addresses
  • 🟩 Phone Numbers
  • 🟪 ID Card Numbers
  • 🟨 IP Addresses
  • 🟫 Passwords (password: …)

  Matches in OCR text are replaced with placeholders (e.g. [API_KEY]); matches in screenshots are covered with per-type colored rectangles. A multi-line token heuristic handles long keys split across OCR lines.

• Manual OCR panel — when auto-OCR is off, a small floating thumbnail lets you trigger OCR on demand.

• Paste as File Path (for CLI) (new in v1.2.0) — terminals can't paste image data, so Cmd+V-ing a screenshot into Claude Code or other CLI tools gives you nothing. Toggle this on and each screenshot is also cached to a file (~/Library/Caches/<bundle>/clip-current.png); the clipboard carries both the image and the absolute path. Cmd+V in a terminal yields the path, and Claude Code reads the image directly. Off by default so pasting into Slack / Mail / image editors still works as before. The cache is single-file rolling — at most one file ever exists, cleared before the next screenshot, on any external clipboard write, on quit, and at launch.

• Economy Mode (new in v1.2.9) — caps the screenshot sent to LLMs at 512px long edge instead of the standard 1568px, cutting Claude vision-token cost by roughly 89%. Off by default; best for screenshots already cropped to the relevant text, since full-screen or code captures will blur at 512px. Local OCR always runs on the full-resolution original, so recognized text is unaffected.

• Send Clipboard to Obsidian (new in v1.2.7) — pick any Obsidian vault once, then any clipboard text or image can be one-clicked into the vault as a new note. Images are saved as PNG attachments alongside the note; text becomes the note body. Optionally auto-open the new note in Obsidian after save.

• Launch at login toggle.

• Bilingual UI — automatically follows system language (中文 / English).

Notes on macOS 26.4+

Starting with macOS 26.4, screencapture changed how it writes screenshots: the image is first saved to a dot-prefixed temp file (e.g. .截屏….png) and only renamed (dropping the leading dot) up to ~55 seconds later, after a batch of metadata / Biome work finishes. The original "intercept the file the moment it lands and delete it" approach in v1.2.7 raced this rename and surfaced the system dialog "Could not save screenshot. The file could not be written to the intended destination."

From v1.2.8 onward, ClipboardOnly reads the dotfile but leaves it on disk for screencapture to finish with, then silently cleans up the renamed file. As a side-effect the temp file lives in ~/.clipboard_only/intercept/ for up to a minute per screenshot — it's in a hidden directory, invisible in Finder, and removed automatically once the rename completes. The user-facing promise ("no leftover screenshot files") is unchanged.

Install

Grab the latest .zip from the Releases page, unzip, and drag ClipboardOnly.app into /Applications.

First launch — bypassing Gatekeeper

Because the app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, macOS will block it on first launch with a "Apple could not verify… is free of malware" dialog. Choose either workaround:

Option A — Terminal (one line):

xattr -cr /Applications/ClipboardOnly.app

Then double-click the app normally.

Option B — System Settings:

1. Try to open the app once (you'll get the block dialog — click Done).
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security.
3. Scroll to the bottom; you'll see "ClipboardOnly was blocked…" — click Open Anyway.
4. Confirm with your password / Touch ID.

Contributors

Built collaboratively with the help of:

• Claude Code (Anthropic) — primary implementation
• OpenAI Codex — code review