ScreenshotPal

A lightweight macOS menubar app for browsing, previewing, and managing your screenshots and screen recordings.

Features

• Menubar access — Lives in your menubar for instant access. No dock icon.
• Auto-detection — Reads your macOS screenshot location from system preferences, or lets you pick a custom folder.
• Live updating — Watches your screenshot directory and refreshes automatically when new files appear.
• Screenshots & videos — Supports .png screenshots and .mov screen recordings with video thumbnail generation and a frosted play indicator.
• QuickLook preview — Select a tile and press Space to preview. Press Space again to dismiss.
• Keyboard navigation — Arrow keys navigate the grid. QuickLook updates as you move.
• Context menu — Right-click any tile for Open, Open With, Show in Finder, Copy, and Move to Trash.
• Drag & drop — Drag thumbnails directly into other apps.
• Configurable directory — Choose any folder via the settings pane; persists across launches.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
Space	Toggle QuickLook preview for selected item
Arrow keys	Navigate the thumbnail grid
Double-click	Open with default app
Right-click	Context menu (Open, Open With, Finder, Copy, Trash)

Architecture

ScreenshotPal is a hybrid SwiftUI + AppKit app:

• AppKit handles system integration — NSStatusBar for the menubar icon, NSPopover for the floating panel, NSEvent monitors for keyboard/mouse handling.
• SwiftUI provides all user-facing views — the screenshot grid, thumbnails, settings pane, and empty states.
• DispatchSource watches the screenshot directory at the file-descriptor level for real-time updates.
• AVAssetImageGenerator extracts first-frame thumbnails from screen recordings.
• QLPreviewView in a non-activating NSPanel provides QuickLook without stealing focus from the popover.

ScreenshotPal/
├── AppDelegate.swift                  # Menubar icon, popover, click monitoring
├── ScreenshotPalApp.swift                 # SwiftUI entry point
├── Models/
│   ├── Screenshot.swift               # Data model (image or video)
│   ├── ScreenshotStore.swift          # State, file loading, directory watching
│   └── ScreenshotDirectoryManager.swift  # OS detection, custom path persistence
├── Views/
│   ├── MenubarPopover.swift           # Main UI, QuickLook, keyboard handling
│   ├── ScreenshotGrid.swift           # 3-column LazyVGrid
│   ├── ScreenshotThumbnail.swift      # Tile with hover, selection, context menu
│   └── SettingsView.swift             # Directory picker
└── Resources/
    └── Assets.xcassets/               # App icon

Building

Open ScreenshotPal.xcodeproj in Xcode and build, or from the command line:

xcodebuild build -project ScreenshotPal.xcodeproj -scheme ScreenshotPal -configuration Debug

Requires macOS 14+ and Xcode 15+.

Usage

1. Launch the app — an icon appears in your menubar.
2. Left-click the icon to open the screenshot browser.
3. Right-click the icon to quit.
4. Click the gear icon to change the screenshot directory.

Credits

Inspired by Shotty, a fantastic screenshot manager for macOS. ScreenshotPal is a free, open-source alternative built as a learning project.

App icon by bloxxk via macOS Icons.