Encrypted screenshot album and screen capture tool. Capture a region, a window or every monitor with Print Screen, mark it up and redact it, and find it again by the text inside the picture. When a picture is not enough, record the screen to MP4 or GIF.
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Install or run portable. Free, open source, GPLv3.
No account, subscription, or ads.
The app sends no usage analytics.
What it is for
Finding it again. Keep screenshots in an encrypted album on your PC, with collections, notes and search. Find a retained picture from a word Windows recognized inside it, even if you only copied it to a ticket when you took it.
Grabbing proof for a ticket. Press Print Screen, drag around the error, and release to capture it. With clipboard copying enabled, the picture is ready to paste into the ticket.
Showing someone where to click. Add an arrow, a box and a line of text, black out the account number, and copy the result.
When a picture is not enough. Record the steps as a short MP4 or GIF, with the sound if it matters.
Read the story behind it on the About page.
Built from scratch
KillerShot is written in C# and WPF on .NET 10 for Windows 11.
The album is a SQLCipher database encrypted with AES-256, with a full-text index over the text Windows reads from each picture.
Captures crop from one copy of the whole desktop taken at 96 DPI, one image pixel per screen pixel, so nothing is rescaled.
MP4 uses the H.264 and AAC encoders built into Windows. The GIF encoder, the region selector and the editor were written for KillerShot.
The Technical page explains the album and the capture and recording pipelines.
Fully featured
- An encrypted album of every capture, searchable by the text in each picture
- Collections, notes, and shelf, carousel, grid and timeline views
- Region, window, monitor and all-monitor capture from Print Screen
- A frozen desktop, so menus and tooltips stay in the picture
- Covered windows captured whole through Windows Graphics Capture
- PNG and bitmap on the clipboard, PNG or JPEG to a folder
- Editor with arrows, shapes, text, highlighter, redaction and crop
- MP4 with system sound and microphone, or animated GIF
- Headless command line and KillerMCP tools for scripts and agents
- Thirteen themes, eight accents and 20 languages
What it does
Encrypted screenshot album
Screenshots, thumbnails, notes and searchable text live together in an AES-256 encrypted database. Its key is protected by your Windows account by default, or you can set an album password. See how the encryption works.
Know what stays protected
Album encryption protects the saved library. Exported PNGs and JPEGs, MP4 and GIF recordings, and pictures in the live Screenshots folder are ordinary files. Clipboard copies follow your Windows history and sync settings.
Search inside your screenshots
Windows reads the text in every capture in the background, so a search finds the screenshot with the error code in it. Window titles, program names, notes and collection names are searched too.
Shelves, carousels and timelines
Browse the album as shelves of carousels by day or collection, one large carousel, a grid or a timeline. Sort captures into collections, add notes, and keep everything or only the last 100 to 5,000 captures or 30 to 365 days.
The collection strip
With a picture open, the rest of its collection runs in a photo carousel above or below it, and the collections sit in a sidebar to the left or right. Move either with Alt+Shift and an arrow key, or minimize the sidebar to one line per collection.
Your Screenshots folder, live
Windows' own Screenshots folder shows up as a collection, read straight from the files, so new pictures appear as they arrive. Add any of them to the encrypted album to keep it there.
Print Screen, taken over
Plain Print Screen starts a region rectangle. Alt+Print Screen takes the active window, Ctrl+Print Screen the monitor under the pointer, Shift+Print Screen every monitor, and Ctrl+Shift+Print Screen starts or stops a recording. One switch, in About or the tray menu, takes Print Screen back from Snipping Tool. Every shortcut can be changed or turned off.
Frozen desktop
The whole desktop is copied the moment you press the key, so open menus and tooltips stay in the picture and the selection overlay never does. Drag a rectangle across monitors with different scaling; Window mode lets you highlight and click a window. Escape or a right-click cancels with nothing copied.
Window capture
Window mode uses Windows Graphics Capture, so a window that is partly covered still comes out whole, and its rounded corners are filled from the desktop behind it. Turn on window picking to click the window you want instead of taking the active one.
Clipboard first
Every capture goes straight to the clipboard as PNG for apps that read it and as a standard bitmap for everything else. A clipboard another program is holding is retried, then reported instead of silently skipped.
Save without asking
Captures can also save straight into a folder, Windows' own Screenshots folder by default, named from a pattern with the date, time, mode and size. Choose PNG or JPEG with a quality setting, add a delay of up to 30 seconds, or have KillerShot ask where to save each one.
Editor
Pen, highlighter, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, text, redaction and crop, plus select and move, 50 steps of undo and redo, Fit and 100% zoom. The finished picture exports at the capture's exact pixel size, and the colors you pick are the colors you get.
Redaction that holds
Redaction is an opaque block, not a blur. The saved file and the clipboard copy carry the flattened pixels, so nothing hidden rides along underneath.
Screen recording
Record a region, window or monitor to MP4 with system sound, the microphone or both, or to an animated GIF. A countdown, then a frame and a Pause, Stop and Discard bar that never appear in the video.
GIFs that stay small
The GIF encoder was written for KillerShot. Each frame stores only what changed, with its own palette, and the size, color count, frame rate and looping are yours to set.
Print the capture from the editor with Ctrl+P or straight from the tray, with options to shrink, enlarge and rotate it to fit the page.
Command line ready
Capture a monitor, window, rectangle or every monitor, record for a set time, and list, search, copy or export library captures from scripts and scheduled tasks, with JSON output and dependable exit codes. See every command.
Works with KillerMCP
Agents connected through KillerMCP can list monitors and windows, take screenshots and recordings, and open an image in the editor on your screen. See the tools.
Private by design
No account, no analytics and nothing uploaded. Captures stay on your PC unless you paste, save or share them yourself.
Themes and languages
Thirteen themes with Dark and Teal as the default, eight accent colors on the neutral themes, Film Grain on or off with Alt+Shift+G, and 20 languages. F1 shows every shortcut as a list or a keyboard map.
Lives in the tray
KillerShot can start with Windows and wait in the notification area. The tray menu captures in each mode, records, saves or prints the last capture and opens the output folder.