Bench guide

Take a screenshot and share a link in one keystroke on Mac

Skip the upload step entirely — capture a region of your Mac screen and walk away with a shareable URL already in your clipboard.

4 min read

Your manager pings you about a bug. You grab a screenshot, drag it into Slack, wait for the upload bar, and finally hit send. Multiply that by ten times a day and it adds up. The faster move is to share a link instead of a file — but only if the link part is genuinely instant.

Two paths

The free way (built-in macOS)

macOS has a perfectly good screenshot tool — it just stops short of sharing.

  1. Press ⌘⇧5 to bring up the Screenshot toolbar.
  2. Pick Capture Selected Portion, drag a region, and click Capture.
  3. The screenshot lands on your Desktop as Screenshot 2026-…png.
  4. Open Slack, Mail, or whatever you're using. Drag the file in. Wait for the upload.
  5. Or, if you want a real URL, upload it manually to iCloud Drive or Google Drive and copy the share link from there.

For one-off screenshots this is fine. For anything you do regularly, the friction is in step 4 onwards — the part the OS doesn’t help with.

The Bench way

Bench collapses capture and share into a single keystroke. Hit the shortcut, drag, and a short URL is already on your clipboard before you’ve alt-tabbed.

  1. Press ⌘⇧2 to start an area capture. Drag to select the region.
  2. Bench shows a small preview in the corner of your screen with a Share button. Click it.
  3. A bnch.sh/… link copies straight to your clipboard.
  4. Paste it anywhere — Slack, an email, a Linear ticket. The recipient opens it in a browser, no app required.

If you want capture-and-share to happen automatically without that intermediate Share click, turn on Auto-upload after capture in Settings → Bench Cloud. After that, ⌘⇧2 alone produces a clipboard-ready link.

A note on privacy: links Bench Cloud generates use 20-character unguessable codes — they aren’t indexed and they aren’t crawlable. If a screenshot turns out to contain something you didn’t mean to share, you can delete the upload from the Bench Cloud library and the link goes dead.

The wider point: most of the time you don’t need to send the image, you need to send what’s in the image. A link does that without clogging anyone’s downloads folder.

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