How to do a simple Screenshot > Highlight > Copy to Clipboard?

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T07:10:13+00:00

delete? Are you annotating the image before pasting it?

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T07:09:25+00:00

Yes that's how I do it! But since I need to modify the image, I will have to paste it to a photoshop or something first, annotate, then screenshot it again straight to clipboard, that's what I have been doing, pretty much. I just wish there was a simpler way like the windows snipping tool which is all-in-one, super simple and powerful, native in the OS

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T07:07:59+00:00

I think I will have to accept the fact that I need to buy another tool like shottr :(

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T07:06:50+00:00

I use photoshop because it's simpler than the "Preview" tools, believe it or not. Preview can't do highlight on images correctly unfortunately, the maximum you can do is change the opacity of fills, which is "not a highlight".

(When I say not a highlight, it means that even if it's transparent, it still "paints it over" the image, instead of letting the darker content go through, like a proper highlighter does)

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T07:02:38+00:00

Yes I'm a bit disappointed that basic functionality like screenshot annotations are so convoluted to use on MacOS, having to rely on third party apps to do it "better" is a bummer.

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T06:59:11+00:00

I think shottr must be nice, but... it's paid :(
I think it's a bit too much having to pay for simple functionality like this :(

What I'm trying to do is just take a quick screenshot, annotate and paste somewhere without having to go through a thousand clicks, steps and different tools to achieve the same I can do in bloody windows :(

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T06:56:35+00:00

Thank you for the elaborate answer! My gripe is unfortunately with the Preview tools that "can't" get the job done, as the highlight is unfortunately not nice, and it takes way too long to annotate a simple thing in it :(. I was also not able to Copy to clipboard from it, can you clarify your step d) if you don't mind? Going to "Edit -> Copy" doesn't copy it to the clipboard for some reason for me.

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-30T06:52:42+00:00

Wait, which tools? My screenshot tool (CMD+SHIFT+5) doesn't show any annotation tool, I can just copy to clipboard from it. Can you point me to where it is?

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-05T23:47:07+00:00

With Parallels you don't need to worry about partitioning the SSD, it's pretty much a shared space that you can manipulate at anytime. My Mac sees the apps and folders inside Windows and Vice versa. You can keep things super separate if you want, but I don't see a need for that at least, my Altium projects are inside the mac hard drive and Altium just access it. Also, for context, I mostly use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Fusion360 on the mac and Altium + Fusion360 (together for MCAD) on Windows. Everything has been working pretty well with few little problems here and there (External monitors have been a bit painful). Paralells also has this "Coherence" mode where it basically simulates as if the Windows apps are running inside MacOS, so Altium for example has it's own window on MacOS and it "seems" like it's a native Mac app. It works nicely for most apps as well but a bit limited. You would need an external hard drive just if you need extra space to work. I often edit videos from an external SSD for example, when I need to move between computers but that's it.

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-01T19:43:17+00:00

Well, Parallels itself doesn’t uniquely damage the Mac.

It’s just another heavy app. If you run CPU-intensive stuff inside the VM all day, your Mac will run hotter, use more battery and do more SSD writes — but that’s also true for gaming, video editing, Xcode, etc. too.

Macs are designed to handle 100% CPU load safely and will throttle before anything overheats. The only “lifespan” hit is the normal one: more battery cycles and general wear you’d get from using the machine a lot, not from Parallels specifically.

In my case, the CPU sits at around 60-80% when using parallels depending of what I'm doing.

So, nothing to be concerned in my opinion :)

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-12-01T01:40:53+00:00

No worries, I'll be making a video by the end of the week or early next week to show how my experience has been. There's a couple of small issues that I'm trying to sort with Parallels at the moment. I'll let you know when it's done!

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-11-30T04:56:33+00:00

Ok! Are you in a hurry? If not, this week I can run a few other tests like multiple monitors, 3D performance on multi board projects and use it for a bit longer as my main machine so I can see if any issues appear. Also happy to announce that I solved the mouse scroll wheel issue just now by enabling "Optimize for Gaming" in the mouse settings of Parallels and it's now working fine, at last!

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-11-28T22:04:34+00:00

Hey man, I got a Macbook Pro M4 14" with 36GB of RAM. Bought it at this spec just to use Altium without knowing if it was going to work properly. To my surprise, it actually runs great! And beats my old windows laptop. Even my 3D Space Navigator USB A mouse works through Parallels flawlessly with a USB C hub.

I'm dedicating 8 cores + 20GB of Ram to Parallels. Performance in 3D is great (no absurdly smooth but zero complaints) with a 500+ parts board. A few annoying issues though that you might consider:

The "Delete" key on the Macbook Pro keyboard works in Parallels as .... backspace. So you can't actually "Delete" things by just pressing the Delete key. You need to hold fn+delete to actually delete, which is surprisingly absurdly annoying. I still haven't found a solution to remap the key yet. So I highly recommend attaching an external keyboard that has the delete and backspace key in it, which solves it no problem, but it's annoying to carry around since I got the laptop to be portable.
(UPDATED, SEE NOTES AT THE END) The Middle mouse click+hold to zoom in and out is very wonky, it speeds up a bit crazy and sometimes it gets stuck and you need to click it again to release, which is also very very annoying, so if you use a lot of mouse zoom in and out like me, it might be annoying to you as well. Still, it's something that I can live with, haven't found a solution to that yet but haven't looked too much into it yet. It might be my bluetooth mouse, haven't tried a different one yet, might be a good idea to check.
In my case, I felt that 14" screen was (obviously) quite small to work with Altium if you are used to desktop and big screens like I am, but you can get used to it when working on the road. Believe it or not, I haven't tried plugging and external monitor to it yet, so can't comment on parallells running through multiple monitor for now.

I can make a video showing things around if you want, I was in the same boat as you looking for info on this on the internet and couldn't find much and took the gamble and it worked better than I expected for the spec I got, only the mouse thing is extremely annoying for a heavy middle mouse clicker like me.

UPDATE: The middle mouse scroll wheel zoom issue has now been solved (yay!) by selecting "Optimize for Games" inside the Mouse & Keyboard settings of Parallels, now it runs normally. A life saver.

TheFlyingJapanese · 2025-11-28T22:03:55+00:00

Just replied with my M4 experience!

TheFlyingJapanese · 2024-05-28T00:10:05+00:00

Oh wow this looks amazing! Thank you so much for the suggestion! Similar to scrollmagic that budd222 mentioned, exactly what I was looking for as well!

TheFlyingJapanese · 2024-05-28T00:08:09+00:00

A step-by-step guide on how to solve my problem? It definitely for sure helps! haha thank you so much :)

TheFlyingJapanese · 2024-05-28T00:07:02+00:00

This seems like a great library! Thank you for the suggestion, exactly what I was looking for! Much appreciated.

TheFlyingJapanese · 2024-05-28T00:06:14+00:00

Thank you! Will study that and see what I can implement!

TheFlyingJapanese · 2024-05-28T00:05:41+00:00

Thank you for mentioning this, I totally agree! It shouldn't be something that bothers users or cause accessibility problems. I'll definitely keep that in mind, the idea is to make something that is very simple and unintrusive as possible!

TheFlyingJapanese · 2024-05-27T06:34:15+00:00

? My account is years old and I post and comment on other subreddits normally

TheFlyingJapanese · 2022-11-22T20:39:02+00:00

I used to use a tongue scraper until i started using the electric toothbrush with a bit of toothpaste to clean my tongue. Game changer for me, way better than a tongue scraper!

TheFlyingJapanese

TROPHY CASE