Crop a screenshot before sharing it

You took a screenshot of the thing you wanted to show, plus three other browser tabs, half your menu bar, and a chunk of your colourful desktop wallpaper. Sending that as-is buries the point. A 10-second crop fixes it.

Two paths

The free way (built-in macOS)

Preview can crop. It’s not exciting but it works.

1. Capture with ⌘⇧4, then open the resulting file in Preview.
2. Press ⌘A to enter selection mode (or use the rectangular selection tool in the Markup toolbar).
3. Drag a rectangle around the part you want to keep.
4. Press ⌘K to crop to the selection, or use Tools → Crop.
5. Save with ⌘S. Preview overwrites the original PNG by default.

The annoying part: you have to take the screenshot, open it in Preview, crop, save, then find the file again to share it. Four apps for what should be one motion.

The Bench way

Bench’s editor opens automatically after every capture, and crop is right in the toolbar.

1. Take a screenshot with ⌘⇧1 (full screen) or ⌘⇧2 (area).
2. The editor pops open. Click the Crop tool in the toolbar.
3. Drag the corner or edge handles to set the crop. The rest of the canvas dims so you can see exactly what stays.
4. Click Apply (or press Return) to commit. Want to redo? The crop is non-destructive — re-enter the tool and adjust at any time.
5. Hit Share to copy a bnch.sh/… link, or drag the thumbnail directly into Slack, Mail, or a doc.

Because Bench keeps the original PNG intact and stores the crop rectangle separately as part of the capture’s edit state, you can come back days later and uncrop without losing pixels. Useful when you crop too tight and realise you also needed the URL bar.

If you’d rather crop while capturing, just drag a tighter region with ⌘⇧2 in the first place. The capture itself is your first crop — the editor is for the second-pass cleanup.