You can create a screenshot either by using the Control + Print keys on your keyboard
or by right clicking the MycoCap icon in the notification area.
There are several options for creating a screenshot:
Windows 11 also uses Print for its Snipping Tool, so a bare Print press never reaches MycoCap. That is why the defaults below add a modifier; every hotkey can be changed in the settings dialog, under Hotkeys.
From the tray menu or the hotkeys you can also delay a capture by a few seconds, e.g. to open a menu first.
Right-clicking the MycoCap icon in the notification area opens one menu, in three groups:
Support MycoCap sits on that menu rather than behind More, so helping the project is one click: it opens the support page in your browser. MycoCap stays free and open source either way, and nothing else about the app changes.
More holds everything that is not a first-class verb: capturing the last region again, the window list, the clipboard, opening a file, the capture delay, capture recipes, quick preferences and Exit.
Every row has an access key, so the menu is fully usable from the keyboard: once it is open, press the underlined letter - R for a region, T for Settings, H for Help, S for Support MycoCap, M for More. The key shown on the right of the capture rows is the hotkey that does the same thing without opening the menu at all (see Every hotkey).
Each of these has a row in General › Hotkeys, so it can be changed or cleared. Clearing a row (press Delete in it) turns that hotkey off; the tray menu still reaches every verb.
| Hotkey | What it does |
|---|---|
| Control + Print | Capture a region |
| Shift + Print | Capture the last region again |
| Alt + Print | Capture a window |
| Control + Shift + Print | Capture the whole screen |
| Control + Shift + T | Copy text from a region of the screen (recognise it, then offer it to copy) |
| Control + Shift + G | Scrolling capture: select a region, scroll it yourself, and the frames are stitched into one image |
| Control + Shift + P | Pin the last capture to the screen |
Chords Windows already uses are refused when you try to record them, and the row keeps the combination it had before. That covers copying, pasting, cutting, undoing, saving, printing, finding, selecting all, opening a file, opening a new window or tab, closing a tab or window, and the system chords Control + Shift + Esc, Alt + F4 and Alt + Tab. MycoCap's hotkeys are grabbed globally, so owning one of those would fire a capture and still swallow the key - Control + C would capture a window and never copy anything. Adding a modifier keeps a chord legal: Control + Shift + C is fine, Control + C is not.
The region capture mode allows you to select a part of your screen to be shot.
After starting region mode, you will see a crosshair pointing out the mouse
position on the screen. Click and hold where you want one of the corners of your
screenshot to be. Still holding down the mouse button, drag the mouse to define
the rectangle to be shot. When the selection rectangle covers the area you want to
be captured in your screenshot, release the mouse button.
You can use the Space key to switch between region and window mode.
If you want to capture an exact area, it might be easier to select the initial screenshot area slightly larger and to crop the screenshot afterwards using MycoCap's image editor.
If you did a region or window capture before, you can capture the same region again using this option.
Creates a screenshot of the window which is currently active.
The settings dialog offers an option not to capture the active window right away, but allowing you to select one interactively. If this option is selected, you may select a window by clicking it (As in region mode, MycoCap will highlight the area that will be captured).
Capturing context menus on their own is different: using the "Capture window" shortcut would make the context menu disappear, and obviously the same would happen if you used MycoCap's context menu in order to create the screenshot. If you want to capture a context menu you have just brought up by right-clicking anything, simply activate region mode Control + Print, then press the Space key.
Creates a screenshot of the complete screen (all displays).
Recognises the text in a part of the screen and lets you copy it, without keeping the picture. Select the region exactly as in region mode; only the text inside that region is read. The result appears in a small window with the recognised text as the engine produced it - line breaks and word spacing are not rewritten - plus Copy all, Copy selected, Cover sensitive text and Close.
The same command is available from the tray menu (More › Copy text from screen) and from the image editor's File menu.
Nothing is copied until you choose a copy action, so a stray click cannot put a password on the clipboard. The recognised text is never logged, saved, added to the capture history or sent anywhere: it stays in the window and, when you copy it, on the clipboard (which follows your clipboard auto-clear setting).
If the window says text recognition is unavailable or did not finish in time, the text was not read - that is different from "no readable text was found", which is only shown after a scan that actually ran and found nothing.
Cover sensitive text opens the selected region in the image editor with an opaque cover over every email address, token and card number - the same one-click redaction as Effects › Cover sensitive text. Save the image there to share the covered version; nothing is saved automatically.
Captures content that is taller than the screen - a long chat history, a web page, a log - as one image. Select the region exactly as in region mode, then scroll the content yourself with the wheel or the scrollbar. MycoCap watches the region and stitches every frame into a single picture. A small panel stays on top with the instruction and a live count of stitched frames: press Enter when you are done, or Esc to discard everything.
The same command is available from the tray menu (More › Scrolling capture) and from the image editor's File menu.
MycoCap never scrolls anything itself: it does not send wheel, key or automation input to other applications, so the application keeps behaving exactly as it would without the capture. You are always the one scrolling.
The frames stay in memory and nothing is written to disk or to the capture history while you scroll. The finished image opens in the image editor, where annotate, save and the destination buttons work as usual - and where you decide whether it is saved at all.
The capture stops by itself when nothing changes for three seconds (it keeps what it has) or when nothing moved at all for eight seconds (there was nothing to stitch). Scrolling back up is watched exactly like scrolling down, and the three-second timer restarts whenever the content moves, so re-reading a page never ends the capture. It looks ten times a second while rows are still being added and four times a second once nothing is moving. It also stops with an explanation if the content jumps further than one region height, moves sideways instead of down, or changes too much to match confidently - a weak match is reported, never guessed, and content that repeats itself (so that two scroll positions look identical) is refused rather than stitched twice. A scrollbar inside the region is ignored, so selecting a whole window instead of just its text works too, and rows that never move - a sticky header or footer - are left out of the comparison instead of counting against the take. A stop that has already captured rows opens them in the image editor and says how many pixels of the page the image holds, so nothing that was captured is thrown away and nothing is passed off as complete. Long captures are capped at 120 frames, 32,000 pixels of stitched height and 128 MB of image data, so a runaway session cannot exhaust memory.
Pinning puts a copy of a capture in a small always-on-top window so you can keep it in view while you work - a reference number, an address, a piece of text you are copying from - without saving a file or sending it anywhere. The window is borderless, stays above ordinary windows, and does not appear in the taskbar or in Alt+Tab. It lives in memory: no file is written, no destination runs, and nothing is added to the capture history.
There are five ways in. From the capture notification, open More and choose Pin to screen. Press Ctrl + Shift + P to pin the last capture again, from anywhere - if nothing has been captured yet the notification area says so instead of opening an empty window. In the image editor, use File › Pin to screen or the pin button in the toolbar - it pins the picture as it looks right now, edits included. And the tray menu's Pinned images submenu lists every pin that currently exists, with its opacity and click-through switches and Close all pinned images.
Right-click a pin, or press Shift + F10, for all of its commands on one menu.
A pin is excluded from other applications' screenshots by default: Windows is told to leave it out of any screen capture, so a pinned password or account number cannot silently leak into somebody else's screen capture. Include in screenshots in the pin's menu reverses that for one pin, for when you do want it in a picture. MycoCap's own captures leave pinned windows out either way, so a pin never turns up by accident in a screenshot you take. On Windows versions that predate this ability the menu says so instead of pretending.
MycoCap comes with an easy-to-use image editor for adding annotations and shapes to a screenshot, and for covering the parts of it you do not want to share. It keeps a full undo history: Control + Z steps back, Control + Y steps forward again, one action at a time. A whole group, a whole batch of suggested covers, and a whole alignment or distribution each count as a single action, so undo never leaves half of one behind.
MycoCap's image editor may not only be used for screenshots. You can also open images for editing from a file or from clipboard. Simply right click the MycoCap icon in the notification area and select Open image from file or Open image from clipboard, respectively.
By default, the image editor will be opened whenever a screenshot is captured. If you do not want to use the image editor, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.
Select one of the shape drawing tools from the toolbar on the left hand side
of the image editor or from the Insert menu. There is also a key assigned
to each tool for your convenience.
Available shapes are: rectangle R, ellipse E, line L,
arrow A and freehand line F. There are also special annotation
tools: speech bubble S, step counter I (which numbers
your annotations automatically), emoji M, and the two tools that hide what is
underneath them - Cover sensitive text O and Redact
X - which are described under
covering sensitive text.
Click, hold down the mouse button and drag to define position and size of the shape.
Release the mouse button when you are done.
You can move or resize existing shapes after selecting the selection tool
ESC from the toolbar.
For every element type there is a specific
set of options available to change the look of the element (e.g. line thickness,
line color, fill color). You can change the options for an existing element after
selecting it, but also for the next element to be drawn after selecting a drawing tool.
You can select multiple elements for editing at a time. In order to select multiple elements, hold down the Shift key while clicking the elements.
If you want to draw equilateral shapes (e.g. force a rectangle to be a square) hold
down Shift while drawing. When drawing lines or arrows, holding down Shift
results in the line's angle being rounded in steps 15°.
You can also use Shift if you want to resize an existing object maintaining it's aspect ratio.
When drawing or scaling, you can hold down Ctrl to have the object anchored in it's geometrical middle. I.e. the object is resized in the opposite direction, too. (This is very handy if you want to draw an ellipse around something on your screenshot.)
Lines and arrows additionally offer stroke styles (solid, dashed, dotted and dash-dot), selectable from the properties strip. An arrow can carry a head at the start, at the end, at both ends or at neither, and the head itself can be filled, open or hollow, at its own size. Rectangles have a Corner radius, which is what turns a sharp box into a rounded one. Every element can also be drawn at less than full opacity, so a note can sit over the picture without hiding what is beneath it - except a redaction, which always stays fully opaque by design.
Usage of the text tool T is similar to the usage of the
shape tools. Just draw the text element to the desired
size, then type in the text.
Double click an existing text element to edit the text.
Hit Return or Enter when you have finished editing.
If you need to insert line breaks within a text box, hit Shift + Return or Shift + Enter.
Formatting can be applied to part of a text box rather than the whole thing. Select the words inside the box and use Control + B for bold, Control + I for italic and Control + U for underline - the same key again takes the style back off. A right-click inside the text opens Selection formatting, which offers bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and a color for just the selected words. A tick mark shows what the selection already carries, so nothing depends on spotting a color.
The text color is the letters only. The box's border has its own color and thickness, and the fill behind the text is separate again, so a colored heading inside a white box with a blue border is three ordinary choices rather than a compromise.
For size there is a Size preset menu with four named steps - Heading, Subtitle, Body and Caption - instead of guessing at a number. Control + [ and Control + ] step the size of the selected text down and up, and Fit text to box resizes the text so it fills the box you drew. A text element can also carry a drop shadow, with a color and a softness that controls how far it spreads.
After selecting the highlight tool H, you can define the area to be
highlighted exactly like you would draw a shape.
There are several options for highlighting, which you can choose from by clicking
the leftmost button in the toolbar on top:
Covering parts of a screenshot is a good idea if it contains data which is not intended for other people to see, e.g. bank account data, names, passwords or faces on images. There are two tools for it, and they are not interchangeable. Redact X paints a solid, opaque block, so the pixels underneath are not in the saved file at all. Cover sensitive text O blurs or pixelates instead, and blur and pixelation are filters applied while the picture is drawn: the original pixels are still there, in the editor and in a saved project file, and can be recovered. For anything private, use Redact.
Both tools are used exactly like the highlight tool: select the tool and draw over the area. A redaction always stays fully opaque - the opacity control refuses to go below full while one is selected, because a half-transparent cover still shows what it is meant to hide.
The editor can also suggest redactions automatically: it scans the image text for e-mail addresses, IP addresses, keys, card numbers and similar patterns and proposes a box over each match. Always review the suggestions before saving or sharing — you can also cover anything manually at any time, and the whole batch is a single undo step.
Available options for the Cover sensitive text tool are:
* Depeding on the performance of your computer, applying a blur effect might slow down
MycoCap's image editor. If you feel the image editor reacting slowly as soon as a
blur is applied, try reducing the value for Preview quality in the toolbar or
decrease the value for Blur radius.
If the blur performance is still too bad for you to work with, you might prefer
to use the pixelize effect instead.
You can add different effects to your screenshot. You might want to apply a border, shadow or torn edges effect, e.g. to visually separate your screenshot from other content in a document. The Grayscale and Invert effects are mainly useful before printing, saving ink or toner when printing colorful or dark screenshots.
The three effects that have settings each get their own labelled row in the Effects menu - Border settings, Drop shadow settings and Torn edge settings. The row above each of them applies the effect with the settings you last chose; the settings row lets you change them first. What you choose there is remembered, so the next screenshot gets the same look.
If you only need a part of the screenshot you have captured, use the crop tool C
to crop it to the desired area.
After selecting the crop tool, draw a rectangle for the area of the screenshot you want
to keep. You can resize the selected area like any other element.
When you are content with your selection, use the confirm button in the toolbar or hit
the Enter key. You can cancel cropping by clicking the cancel button or hitting
ESC.
Auto crop: If you need to crop a border of solid background color from your screenshot, simply choose the auto crop mode and MycoCap will automatically select the area for cropping.
Use the rotation tools to rotate the screenshot clockwise or anti-clockwise.
You can simply add graphics or images to your screenshot by dragging and dropping an image file into the editor window. Everything the editor can open can be dropped in: PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, ICO and SVG. An SVG arrives as a picture, not as shapes you can edit.
The Insert menu carries the same verbs where you can reach them from the keyboard. Insert picture file... opens a file dialog for one image - the supported way to place a logo or a watermark. Insert window lists the windows that are open so you can insert a screenshot of one. Insert time stamp drops the current date and time in as an ordinary text element you can retype or move; MycoCap never stamps a time on a capture by itself, so this is always a deliberate act. Insert cursor... places a neutral mouse pointer you can position where the click actually happened.
Click an element to select it, and hold Shift while clicking to add or remove others. Dragging on empty canvas draws a selection marquee instead: everything it touches is selected, Shift adds those elements to what is already selected, and Alt or Ctrl takes them out.
Delete removes the selected elements - one undo step, however many go, so Undo Control + Z brings them all back at once. Locked elements on the picture are skipped rather than deleted: a padlock is there to stop exactly this, and a selection of nothing but locked elements leaves the picture untouched. With nothing selected the key does nothing. Control + Delete is the separate command that clears the capture to a transparent background; the elements stay, and that is undoable too.
Moving an element snaps it to the ones around it. Its edges and its center line up with the edges and centers of the other elements, with the canvas edges and its center, and with the gaps that make an even spacing; a thin guide appears while it is held there, so you can see what it lined up with. Hold Alt while dragging to move freely and ignore the snapping - let go and the element stays exactly where you put it.
Group Control + G turns the selected elements into one entry, so they move, resize and delete together; Ungroup Control + Shift + G takes them apart again. To change one element inside a group, double-click the group to step into it, make the change, and press Esc to step back out.
Insert › Align lines the selected elements up with each other - Left, Center, Right, Top, Middle or Bottom. With only one element selected it lines that element up with the picture. Distribute horizontally and Distribute vertically space three or more elements evenly between the outer two; they are greyed out below three, because there is no gap to share out.
Each of those commands is one undo step, however many elements it moved.
The element list - Control + Shift + E, or Element list at the foot of the Insert menu - is the picture's stack of annotations as a list, top-most first. Each row names the element and carries two switches: an eye that hides it on the picture without deleting it, and a padlock that stops it being moved by accident. Rows can be dragged to change the stacking order, or moved with Move up and Move down; selecting a row selects the element on the canvas. The panel collapses to a narrow strip when you want the width back for the picture.
If you find yourself using the same or similar elements on most of your screenshots
(e.g. a textfield containing browser type and version, or obfuscating the same
element on several screenshots) you can re-use elements.
Select Save objects to file from the Insert menu to save the current
set of elements for re-using it later. Load objects from file applies the
same elements to another screenshot.
After editing the screenshot, you can export the result for different purposes, depending on your needs. You can access all export options through the File menu, the topmost toolbar or via shortcuts:
After editing, screenshots can be exported to additional targets such as files, printers or the configured destinations. Use the destination picker or the settings dialog to choose where your screenshots go.
After saving an image from the editor, right-click the status bar at the bottom of the editor window to either copy the file path into the clipboard or open the containing directory in Windows Explorer.
To keep your annotations editable, save the screenshot as a MycoCap project (.mycocap). Project files saved by previous versions can still be opened.
SVG works in one direction only. MycoCap opens an SVG file, and you can insert one as a picture, but it cannot write one - there is no vector writer behind the editor. Every save and export produces one of the raster formats listed above.
If you try to close the editor with unsaved changes, it asks explicitly — Save, Don't save or Cancel — and dirty images carry a * marker in the title bar.
Every capture ends at one or more destinations. You can pick them on the fly from the destination picker, or configure fixed destinations in the destination settings so captures are exported automatically. The available destinations are:
Capture history keeps recent captures on this device so you can find one again later. It is off by default in a new installation: a screenshot is only kept once you turn it on, or when you pick Capture history as the destination for that capture.
While it is on, up to 100 entries are kept in
%LocalAppData%\MyCoCap\History. When the list is full, the oldest entry that you
have not pinned is removed first; pinned entries are never evicted, though they do count
toward the total. Search by title or time, reopen an entry in the editor, pin the ones you
want to keep, delete the rest, or re-upload one from its right-click menu.
Settings › Privacy & data is where it is switched and where it is emptied. The line under the switch names the folder, how many captures are stored and how much space they take; Open data folder shows that folder in Windows Explorer, and Delete all captures removes everything after asking you to confirm. Turning history off stops new entries being written but deletes nothing by itself.
History never leaves your machine: a stored capture is a file in the history folder and nothing else.
Screenshots stay on this device unless you choose a destination that sends them somewhere. MycoCap has no telemetry, analytics or usage tracking, and it does not create an account for you.
The only outbound traffic is the signed update check (see the update check interval), the destinations you set up yourself, and addresses you explicitly open. The full list of what is stored, where, and when anything leaves your computer is in the MycoCap privacy policy, which is also available from Settings under Privacy & data and from About MycoCap.
Settings live in %AppData%\MyCoCap\MyCoCap.ini, the log in %LocalAppData%\MyCoCap\MycoCap.log, and capture history (off by default) in %LocalAppData%\MycoCap\History. That page shows the exact paths on your computer and can delete every stored capture for you.
A portable copy keeps its settings beside MyCoCap.exe instead, but only when a file called MyCoCap.portable sits next to the program as well. Without that marker, a MyCoCap.ini next to the exe is ignored - the settings in your profile are used, and the page says so - because a stray copy must never quietly take over your real settings.
This page answers, in plain language, what MycoCap stores about you, where it keeps it, and how to remove it. It also states that screenshots stay on the device, that there is no telemetry, and that the only traffic is the signed update check plus your own destinations.
By default, MycoCap lets you pick a destination dynamically after creating a screenshot, displaying a small
menu with different destinations to select from. If you do not want or need to switch destinations instantly,
you might prefer to configure MycoCap to export to one or more destinations directly, without displaying the
destination picker.
Note: as with exporting from the editor window, the displayed destinations vary
depending on the destinations available in MycoCap.
MycoCap can also run headless, without opening its user interface. This is handy for scripts and scheduled tasks. The headless commands are:
Without a headless verb, MycoCap starts its normal user interface. Useful startup options are --openfile (open one or more image files in the editor), --ini-directory (use a different folder for the MycoCap.ini configuration file), --language (switch the user interface language), --reload (ask a running instance to reload its configuration) and --exit (ask a running instance to quit).
Headless commands report success or failure through their exit code: 0 means success, 1 a generic error, 2 invalid arguments and 3 a missing file.
To report a bug or suggest a feature, please use the contact details on https://mycocap.net. Please attach the log file, which you can find at %LocalAppData%\MycoCap\MycoCap.log — it usually tells us exactly what went wrong. Your settings live in MycoCap.ini, and editable screenshots are stored as MycoCap project files (.mycocap).
The log level is not in the settings dialog. If a report needs more detail, set MinimumLogLevel in the [Core] section of MyCoCap.ini to Debug or Trace - the other choices are Information, Warning, Error, Critical and None - reproduce the problem, then set it back to Information.
MycoCap is free and open source. There are several things you
can do to support MycoCap and the development team.
Thanks in advance :)
We are putting a lot of work into MycoCap and spending quite some time to provide
a good piece of software for free and open source. If you feel
that it makes you more productive, if it saves you (or your company)
a lot of time and money, or if you simply like MycoCap and
the idea of open source software: please consider honoring our effort by donating.
You can support the MycoCap development here:
https://ko-fi.com/mycocap
The same link is a single click away: Support MycoCap is one of the rows on the tray menu itself, not buried in a submenu, and it is also on the About dialog.
If you like MycoCap, let the people know: tell your friends and colleagues about MycoCap.
Your followers, too :)
Rate MycoCap in software portals or link to our home page from your blog or website.