MerlinShot

Screenshots inside a full-screen remote desktop

MerlinShot takes screenshots of your Windows desktop, marks them up, and turns them into documents. It's built for writing procedures, runbooks and how-to guides while you work inside a remote session, such as Remote Desktop, Citrix, VMware Horizon or a VM console, where the usual screenshot tools get in the way.

• A floating toolbar that stays on top of full-screen remote sessions. Inside a session the keyboard usually belongs to the session, so hotkeys stop working. MerlinShot's toolbar stays reachable with the mouse, and the capture lands on your own PC's clipboard, right where your notes are.
• Long, scrolling capture. Point it at a list, a log or a settings page that's longer than the screen. It scrolls for you and gives you page-sized screenshots, one tall stitched image, or both.

Every capture happens on your own PC. Nothing is installed in the remote session.

Is it for you?

It's a good fit if you:

• write runbooks, procedures, KB articles or handover notes with lots of screenshots;
• spend your day inside RDP, Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, Horizon, vSphere or Hyper-V consoles, or iDRAC and iLO, and want captures on your own PC;
• need to hide IP addresses, host names, email addresses or credentials before sharing a screenshot;
• want to go straight from screenshots to a PDF or Word document with numbered steps.

It's probably not for you if you need video or GIF recording, cloud upload and sharing links, or a Mac or Linux version. MerlinShot respects sessions whose owners block screen capture by policy and doesn't try to get around them.

Features

Capture

• Region, window, monitor or all monitors, plus repeat last region, with a magnifying loupe for exact pixels.
• Scrolling capture, automatic or manual, downwards or upwards for chats and logs that load upwards.
• Copy next (Ctrl+Shift+N) hands you each following page of a long capture, so pasting into a document is quick.
• Grab text: drag over part of the screen and get the words instead of a picture.
• Recent captures are kept even if you didn't save them.

Markup editor

• 17 tools, including arrows, boxes, text, numbered step markers, highlight, blur or solid hide, spotlight, magnify, callouts and stamps.
• Non-destructive crop, rotate, border and trim, full undo, and an editable project format (.mshot).

Hiding sensitive information

• Find sensitive text lists anything that looks like an IP address, host name, email address, license key or credential, and you approve each one before it's covered.
• Add your own words and patterns, such as customer names or server naming schemes.
• Solid redaction removes the pixels from exported images. Blur and pixelate are offered too, but they aren't secure, and MerlinShot says so.

Documents and library

• Export to PDF or Word with a title page, contents list, page numbers and captions.
• Exported documents contain nothing about your PC, only the title and author you type.
• A capture library with tags and search. Captures stay as ordinary PNG files in your Pictures folder.

Price and license

Free beta until January 31, 2027. After that, a license is $39, one time, covering every 1.x version. Licenses go on sale January 1, 2027. It's one payment, not a subscription.

• The key arrives by email. Paste it into License in the tray menu. It's checked on your PC, with nothing sent anywhere.
• Licensed to you by name and not tied to one PC.
• Without a license after January 31, your projects, library and exports still work. Only new captures stop.

Privacy

MerlinShot works entirely on your PC. It doesn't phone home, check for updates, collect usage data or send anything anywhere. Text recognition uses the engine built into Windows and runs locally.

Requirements

Install

1. Download the zip, extract it, and run the setup file inside. If Windows shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway. The app isn't code-signed yet.
2. Choose whether to add a desktop shortcut, start it when you sign in, and open .mshot files with it.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+R and drag out a region to take your first capture.

SHA-256 of the setup file inside the zip:

9457122183FABBAA28BCB9592FF1DEA0CD8A2BA7B89080CF792CF2AAEAD56737

Known limitations

• Sessions protected by policy (for example Citrix App Protection or Horizon screen-capture blocking) capture as black. MerlinShot tells you when that happens.
• In a full-screen session the remote client usually takes key combinations, including MerlinShot's hotkeys. Use the floating toolbar there.
• Scrolling capture can't stitch a region spanning two panes that scroll separately.
• No video or GIF recording.