FAQ

Frequently asked questions about hypershot. For setup help, start with Getting Started.

Capture & the editor

What’s the maximum export size?

8K per side (7680px). See Save to File.

What is a .hypercapture file?

hypershot’s own format — the full frame burst, annotations, and metadata in one editable package. See hypercapture files.

How do I capture a menu/tooltip that only appears while holding the mouse?

Hold to freeze — keep the mouse button down after your selection and release on the right moment. See Hold to Freeze.

Menu bar & tray

The hypershot icon disappeared from my menu bar. Where did it go?

macOS silently hides status icons when the menu bar is full — on notched MacBooks the icon often sits under the notch, invisible. Hold ⌘ and drag the icons in your menu bar to make room for hypershot’s (drag it left, away from the notch), or use a menu bar manager like Bartender to keep things tidy.

How do I move the hypershot icon in the menu bar?

Hold the ⌘ key and drag the icon — the standard macOS way to reorder status items. Your position is remembered across launches, so you won’t have to do it twice.

Performance

Why does hypershot use so much memory on macOS compared to Windows?

Short answer: it’s how macOS accounts memory, not waste. On Windows, hypershot peaks around 500 MB; on macOS you may see 1.5 GB or more in Activity Monitor — especially with multiple high-resolution monitors and as you add effects and annotations. That gap is expected, and here’s why:

• Apple silicon has unified memory. The CPU and GPU share the same physical RAM, so every texture hypershot touches — each captured frame, each annotation layer — counts toward the app’s memory on macOS. On Windows, GPU resources live in dedicated video memory and don’t appear in Task Manager’s per-app numbers. Same work, different accounting — Apple’s own guidance notes GPU memory is part of system memory on these machines.
• Retina scale multiplies everything. A 5K display renders at 5120×2880; a BGRA frame at that size is ~56 MB per buffer, and capture keeps several (the live stream, the frozen frame, the burst history you scrub in the editor). Multiple monitors multiply it again.
• Capture buffers are double-tracked on macOS. Screen capture frames arrive as IOSurfaces — GPU-backed buffers shared between the window server and the app. Activity Monitor’s headline “Memory” column counts this shared/IOKit memory toward hypershot even though the underlying surface is shared system-wide, not privately owned by hypershot.

None of this means hypershot is leaking or hoarding: quit the app and the memory returns immediately, and the footprint scales with your display resolution and how many annotations/effects a capture carries — not with time. For what it’s worth, Activity Monitor’s Real Private Memory column is the honest single number for “memory only hypershot is using”; the default Memory column includes the shared/GPU accounting above.

If you do see memory climb without bound during a long session with no documents open, that’s a bug — tell us at support.hypernuclear.com.

My cursor lags during capture on macOS. What can I do?

Screen-capture tools that install cursor-monitoring helpers can slow the whole system down during capture. If you have Tangrid (or similar cursor-enhancement/pointer apps) installed, try quitting it — capture lag disappears for most users who do. (Other capture apps that don’t monitor the cursor system-wide, like CleanShot, don’t hit this — the culprit is the helper app, not hypershot.)

If that’s not it, check Activity Monitor for anything pinning CPU during capture; hypershot’s capture engine is hardware-accelerated and shouldn’t lag on its own.

Permissions

hypershot stopped working after I changed permissions.

If Screen Recording or Accessibility is revoked mid-use, hypershot relaunches the permissions flow. See Permissions Revoked Mid-Use.

Finder won’t preview my captures.

Enable the Quick Look extension — it’s a manual toggle, and might need a reboot. See Quick Look Extension.

Licensing

How many devices can I activate on?

Three, on both a v1.x and a Lifetime license. See purchasing for current tiers.