How to Pin a Screenshot on Your Mac Screen
Sometimes you want a design mockup beside you, or meeting notes parked on one side of the screen. Floatie leaves a capture right where you drew it instead of saving a file.
Take a screenshot and it usually becomes a file. To keep it on screen you have to open Finder or Preview again.
Floatie works differently. Capture a region and instead of a file you get a shot floating on your screen. Put a design mockup beside your work, keep a code snippet up while you retype it somewhere else, park reference material on one side during a meeting.
No hunting for a file each time — you pick up right where you captured.
Keeping a capture on screen
Here’s the flow.
- Capture the region with ⌘⇧2 (command+shift+2). Changed your mind mid-drag? ESC cancels.
- The shot appears where you drew it. No file is written; it just stays on screen.
- Drag the shot somewhere out of the way. No modifier key needed.
- Size it by dragging an edge, pinching on the trackpad, or pressing - (smaller), = (bigger), 0 (original).
- Scroll over the shot to set its opacity — 20% to 100%, in 5% steps.
- Done looking? ⌘W or ESC closes it.
Keeping it above other apps (Pro)
So far the shot sits above the screen you’re looking at. Bring another app forward and it can cover the shot.
To keep that one shot on top of everything, turn on always-on-top with ⌃⌥P (control+option+P). From then on other apps come forward and the shot stays above them. Other shots you have floating are unaffected — only the one you set.
One thing that trips people up: ⌘O is a different feature, the text-selection lock (Pro). It recognizes the words in a shot so you can drag to select and copy them, which has nothing to do with pinning.
You can also put always-on-top on a corner button in Settings → Appearance → Corner Buttons and toggle it with a click, instead of reaching for the shortcut every time.
Floating several at once, and tidying up
You can have several shots floating at the same time. ⌘⌥2 hides them all and brings them back; ⌘⌥W closes all of them.
Closed shots don’t vanish either. ⌘⇧H opens the history rail, where the ones you closed wait as thumbnails — one click brings a shot back, or deletes it for good. A filter separates screenshots from recordings.
If you often work with something parked on screen for reference, capturing straight into a floating shot and pinning it only when you need to beats opening and closing files. It helps most when you’re comparing across several windows.
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