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Zappy for macOS — Zapier's fast, free screen capture tool for remote teams
When you're spread out, communication gets harder. We built Zappy to help. Our remote team of 300+ uses Zappy daily to share annotated screenshots, GIFs, and recordings in just a few clicks. Today we're releasing it for free.
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Hey Product Hunt 👋 Mike here, Head of Labs and co-founder at Zapier.
We know remote work comes with new challenges. Over the last 8+ years, we've grown Zapier to 300+ employees across 17 time zones. And along the way, we've discovered effective ways to collaborate without an office.
Zappy is a cornerstone tool that increases the bandwidth of our team's communication. It's an all-in-one screen-capture app that we built ourselves. You can use it to annotate screenshots, make GIFs, and record your screen in fewer steps than with most built-in tools.
Since a lot of the world is suddenly working remotely, we’re releasing a public version of Zappy for free. We've found it to be an invaluable tool for sharing images in Slack, emails, and everywhere else. We hope Zappy helps you and your team move faster, even when you’re not in the same location.
Zappy is still in early access, so there might be some rough edges to smooth out. We're also working on features like:
- Self-hosted storage via Amazon S3
- Capture retention + access settings
- A Zapier integration :-)
A bonus for paid Zapier customers: Auto-uploads to the cloud. We host those uploads and add a link to your clipboard automatically. It's great for markdown or adding text links to tutorials.
We hope you like it, and if you have any feedback, let us know!
@mikeknoop love it! Was just recommending cloudapp to a family member at dinner last night as she was looking for exactly this. Zappy looks cleaner and more simple though - with that, any plans for Windows/Chrome Extension?
Keep up the awesome work!
Love it! I'd like to request two things if possible:
1) a zoomed preview when selecting the area to capture
2) a shortcut (like Cmd+C) when selecting an area to copy the hex color under the mouse cursor
Top Hunter
I feel like this is the result of one of those moments where someone at Zapier didn't like the existing solutions (although there are very good solutions (CleanShot 2.0, Xnip, etc), and thought they could build their own, started using it internally, and then thought "we should release this".
DOA for me since it requires a paid Zapier account to use at all.
@chrismessina for clarity, Zappy does not require a paid Zapier account, it stores captures locally for free. That said, If you log in with a paid Zapier account we'll host the captures which makes sharing faster.
I joined Zapier just over 6 months ago and reluctantly installed Zappy. I was a die-hard Skitch user for years so wasn't thrilled at the prospect of switching tools. Within about a week (no joke), I was totally sold. Zappy is excellent (and there's room for improvement—especially when it gets supercharged with connections to Zapier for image-first automations).
A few pro tips: take a screenshot, then press cmd+c to just copy the image itself to your clipboard for easy pasting. If you prefer to share images as links (and you have a pro account), you can press enter and it'll upload to S3 then give you a shareable link. Personally, I prefer copying the image (almost always) and only use the link itself if I'm linking off some text.
Pro tip #2: learn the keyboard shortcuts (there's like 5 + colors). Super easy and handy to snap a shot, add an arrow, add some text, cmd+c to copy, and voila.
Pro tip #3: it takes videos/GIFs! So. Fast... and easy for quick screen shares.
As a student of startups, I always worry about our small team stretching too thin... but I'm optimistic about us sharing Zappy because it's so handy and now I can use it on my personal laptop too 🤞
@mikeknoop I use screen recordings to send feedback to the podcast editors I train and contract out to. We need system audio to hear the podcast audio
@mirkokiefer @mikeknoop I'm not a Mac user, but this is an incredible and useful way to capture your screen. Well done. cc @zapier
Hey all, Mirko here from Blackbelt Labs who co-built Zappy with Mike and the Zapier team. From all the apps we've built over the years, Zappy is the one that gets by far my most personal usage. Excited to get this out publicly and looking forward to feedback from early access users!
@swaycopy sort of, but it requires being crafty. Zappy has a feature that let's you "pin" multiple captures as floating windows -- this lets you reposition parts of the screen that normally are not next to each other. You can then take another screenshot of the mashup.
It's imperfect if you want to screenshot an entire webpage because your screen size is still the limiting factor. We'll consider how to address this. Good feedback!
@mikeknoop Awesome. There are tools that do this, but they always seem to be a little janky. Would be great to have this ability in a tool that is as polished as Zapier (and, I'm sure, Zappy).
A really important and useful tool for product managers. Capture a screenshot, annotate it really quickly and share it on Slack. Even if you are not remote, still a really useful tool!
Nice! I set mine to key off of Opt+Shift+4 to quickly do what my Mac Screenshot does but shareable.
Does not open on my Macbook. I am running macOS Catalina 10.15.4. I have put the file inside the application folder. Any idea what is happening?
Awesome tool guys! Always love seeing the stuff you're coming up with @wadefoster @mikeknoop @mirkokiefer
I can't get it to open on my mac. I'm running Mojave - 10.14.6. I unzip the file, run it but nothing happens. Anyone got any ideas?
@bowett Have you moved/copied the Zappy app in your Application folder? You should be able to double-click on it then (Finder > Applications > Zappy) and it will appear in your menubar on top.
@leo_at_zapier Thanks for the reply. Yes I did try that, same result. I can see it in Activity Monitor but it never opens and is stuck at no CPU and same memory. So it looks like it starts but crashes early on and doesn't terminate properly.
@bowett @etienne_dayer1 I'd suggest completely moving Zappy and try again. I did a quick check to see which locations it's creating files and was able to find them here: https://really.iamno.pro/12uyxxXx
Feel free to tag me again if that doesn't help :)
@bowett @etienne_dayer1 Oh, sorry to hear that! Could you email us over at zappy@zapier.com to address this? I'm not sure if it's a Zappy issue or a macOS issue. This sounds a bit ironic, but please include some screenshots of what you're seeing and attempting. If it's macOS related, it might be possible to see this by booting in safe mode, uninstalling Zappy, reinstall and try again. If there any driver issues or other system processes from different apps, safe mode should do the trick. That said, this feedback is important for the Zappy team, so we'd love to hear you :)
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