Here’s a situation that quietly eats people’s time: you annotated one screenshot — arrows, a box around the culprit, a counter for each step — and now you need that same markup on a different screenshot. A before and after, maybe. Two frames of the same bug.
The obvious answer is to redraw everything. The better answer is that the annotations were never really part of the picture — they’re a layer. So copy the layer.
The move
In the hypershot editor, select your annotations — the arrows, the highlighter strokes, the counters, whatever you drew — and press ⌘C / Ctrl+C. Because something is selected, hypershot copies the annotations themselves, not the image underneath. There’s no background in that clipboard. Just the markup.
Paste (⌘V / Ctrl+V) and the annotations land on the new capture — same shapes, same positions, still fully editable. Re-aim an arrow that lands a few pixels off. Done.
(If you actually wanted the whole image on the clipboard, deselect first — with nothing selected, ⌘C / Ctrl+C copies the entire canvas, PNG, ready to paste into Slack, a doc, or an email. Same key, two jobs, decided by your selection.)
Why it’s a real feature and not a trick
Most tools flatten the moment you draw: annotations get burned into pixels, and from then on they’re paint. Un-painting them is a manual, lossy ordeal. In hypershot the markup lives as objects above the image — moveable, undo-able, copyable as a set. The arrow is an arrow, forever, not a smear.
It makes a quiet workflow possible: annotate once, on the frame where the problem is clearest. Then paste that explanation onto the second frame, the third frame, the version on the other platform. One drawing, many truths.
The version for the other platform
Because captures save as .hypercapture — a self-contained bundle with the annotation layer intact — you can even hand the whole thing to someone else. They open it in hypershot and it’s still editable, arrows included. Your markup survives the trip across the wire.
Draw it once. Paste it anywhere.