SnipTease

A native macOS menu bar utility for framing screenshots for social media — one hotkey, every aspect ratio, with an MCP server built in so agents can grab screenshots too.

What it is

SnipTease lives in your menu bar. Press ⌃⇧S from anywhere, pick a preset, and capture a region that is already shaped for the platform you want to post to. No more cropping in Figma. No more "why is this cut off on LinkedIn."

• Global hotkey — ⌃⇧S from any app.
• Raycast-style mode picker — start typing or hit Tab to switch between platform presets without touching the mouse.
• Safe-zone guides — optional overlay shows the platform's content-safe area so nothing important gets clipped.
• Retina-correct export — screenshots are captured at the display's native resolution, then Lanczos-downscaled to the target export size.
• MCP server for agents — run SnipTease in --mcp mode and your agent can take framed screenshots via JSON-RPC over stdio.
• Native, tiny, no Electron — pure Swift + SwiftUI, uses ScreenCaptureKit, NSStatusItem, and a minimal MCP stdio loop.

Install

Download the release (recommended)

1. Grab the latest .dmg from the Releases page.
2. Open the .dmg and drag SnipTease.app to /Applications.
3. Launch it. The crop icon appears in your menu bar. Grant Screen Recording permission when asked.

Release builds are signed and notarized by Apple — they open without Gatekeeper warnings.

Build from source

Requirements:

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Xcode 15.4+

git clone https://github.com/sky-valley/sniptease.git
cd sniptease
open SnipTease.xcodeproj

Press ⌘R in Xcode, or build from the command line:

xcodebuild -project SnipTease.xcodeproj \
           -scheme SnipTease \
           -configuration Release \
           CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="" \
           CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED=NO \
           CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO \
           build

The built app lands in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/SnipTease-*/Build/Products/Release/SnipTease.app.

Usage

1. Click the crop icon in the menu bar (or press ⌃⇧S).
2. Pick a preset — LinkedIn, X, Instagram, OG image, and friends.
3. Drag to select a region. The overlay shows the safe zone for the preset.
4. Release. The framed screenshot lands on your Desktop and in your clipboard, ready to paste.

MCP server (for agents)

SnipTease doubles as a Model Context Protocol server over stdio. Agents can take framed screenshots using natural-language descriptions of what to capture — SnipTease asks a vision-language model for the bounding box, then frames the result for your chosen preset.

Configure your agent

Add SnipTease to your agent's MCP config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sniptease": {
      "command": "/Applications/SnipTease.app/Contents/MacOS/SnipTease",
      "args": ["--mcp"],
      "env": {
        "GEMINI_API_KEY": "your-gemini-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Get a free Gemini API key at aistudio.google.com/apikey.

Tools exposed

• list_presets — returns the full preset catalog.
• agent_capture — takes a screenshot, asks the VLM where the described region is, frames it into the chosen preset, saves PNG + copies to clipboard.

Example prompt to your agent:

"Capture the paragraph about authentication in the README for an Instagram portrait post."

Presets

ID	Name	Aspect	Export width	Safe margin
og-standard	OG Image	1200:630	1200 px	6%
og-retina	OG Image @2x	1200:630	2400 px	6%
twitter-card	X / Twitter Card	2:1	1600 px	6%
linkedin-feed	LinkedIn Feed	1:1	1200 px	8%
linkedin-landscape	LinkedIn Landscape	1200:627	1200 px	6%
x-square	X Square	1:1	1080 px	7%
x-landscape	X Landscape	16:9	1200 px	6%
ig-square	Instagram Square	1:1	1080 px	8%
ig-portrait	Instagram Portrait	4:5	1080 px	8%
ig-story	Instagram Story	9:16	1080 px	10%

Presets live in SnipTease/PlatformPreset.swift — adding one is a three-line change.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.