Documentation

Getting started

Install Clipio and it opens on Home — your library of past captures, plus the buttons that start a new one. Close the window and the app does not quit; it drops into the system tray, and every capture can be started from there. That is deliberate: a screen recorder you have to go and launch is a screen recorder you do not use.

Nothing is uploaded and nothing needs an account to begin. After a few exports Clipio asks you to create a free one, which is also what the Google Drive connection hangs off.

Capture modes

Three things start from the same place: a screenshot, a recording, and a GIF. The source pickers are shared — pick a dragged region, a window or a whole display, and the picker offers Record and Record GIF side by side.

• Area — drag a region, with a live pixel-dimension readout and a magnifier for the edges.
• Window — pick any open window; Clipio captures it at native scale.
• Display — a whole monitor, including on mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups.
• Scrolling — screenshots only. Scroll yourself, or let Auto Scroll do it, and the frames are stitched into one tall image by matching on row signatures. It works in any scrollable window, not just browsers, because it never asks the app anything.

A finished screenshot lands in a quick card rather than a save dialog. Cards stack rather than replacing each other, so a run of five captures leaves you five cards, each with Copy, Edit, Pin and Share.

Pinning

Pin turns a screenshot into a floating always-on-top window — a reference you can park next to the thing you are rebuilding. It has an opacity control and a lock that makes it fully click-through, so it stops being in the way of the window underneath it.

The three editors

Each capture type opens in an editor built for it, not one generic canvas with irrelevant panels greyed out.

• Screenshot editor — annotations, crop, Auto Frame, a Background & Design panel, and a layers list.
• Video editor — a timeline with segments, plus a Motion panel holding Zoom, Tracking, Spotlight, Speed and Skip idle, and separate panels for annotation, captions, sound, webcam and background.
• GIF editor — a trim screen. A loop does not need keyframes; it needs to be short and small, so that is what the editor is about.

How effects get onto the timeline

Motion effects are dragged from the Motion panel onto the timeline, the way you would in a video editor. Dropping one creates it with a sensible default that you then drag and resize into place. Selecting a chip on the timeline swaps the panel from the browse list to that instance's controls.

Auto zoom

Clipio records where your cursor went and where you clicked, then uses that to push in on the region you were working in and ease back out when you moved on. The easing is a spring, not a linear ramp, which is most of why it reads as edited rather than as a jump cut.

Two things trigger a zoom: a click, and dwell — the cursor sitting still in one area long enough to mean you are pointing at something. Scale, duration and sensitivity are all adjustable.

Cursor & tracking

A raw mouse path is jittery, and that jitter is what makes a screen capture look like a screen capture. Clipio runs the cursor through a critically-damped spring, so it glides, leans into direction changes, and bounces on click.

• Smoothing — adjustable damping, from “barely touched” to heavily eased.
• Skins — a dot, a ring, or the real system pointer, at a size independent of your OS setting.
• Click feedback — bounce, ripple and motion blur.

A Tracking layer is a different thing from a zoom. It has a duration, and while it runs the frame follows the pointer — a slow pan across a wide application rather than a cut to a region. Use zooms for moments and tracking for stretches.

The cursor is excluded from the capture at the source, so what you see in the export is the skinned, smoothed cursor and never a second real one drawn underneath it.

Annotation

Ten tools: arrow, box, ellipse, line, text, pencil, numbered steps, highlighter, spotlight and blur. Numbered steps count themselves, so a five-step walkthrough does not need you to keep track of where you are.

The part worth knowing is that these work on the live screen while a recording is running, not only on a still afterwards. You circle the button in the same second you say “click here”, and you do not scrub back later to find the moment. Every stroke stays editable on the timeline once you stop.

Sensitive-info blur

On-device OCR reads a fresh screenshot as it lands and pixelates anything that matches one of four detectors:

• E-mail addresses
• API keys
• Credit-card numbers
• Password fields

Each detector is independently switchable in Settings → Privacy. The scan runs on fresh captures only — reopening an old screenshot from the library does not re-scan it, so a redaction you removed on purpose does not come back.

Sharing

Share uploads one file to a folder called Clipio Shared in your own Google Drive, sets that file to “anyone with the link can view”, and copies the link to your clipboard. Clipio hosts nothing itself.

The first Share triggers the Google consent screen, then proceeds with the upload — there is no separate setup step. If you would rather connect ahead of time, do it in Settings → Integrations, which also shows which account is connected and lets you disconnect.

Clipio requests the drive.file scope only. That scope grants access to files the app itself created and nothing else, so the rest of your Drive is invisible to it — not by policy, but because Google does not hand over the access.

Two things are worth knowing. The link is Drive's own preview page, not a raw image or video URL. And a shared file stays shared until you change it from Drive; Clipio has no per-file revoke screen yet.

Export

Export runs through FFmpeg, which is why it is fast and why the output plays everywhere without a conversion step.

• MP4 (H.264) and WebM (VP9) at 720p, 1080p or 2K.
• GIF through an optimised palette pass — small files without the colour mush.
• Captions transcribed on-device, editable as a list, then styled and burned in.
• Backgrounds — gradients, solids, wallpapers or your own image, with padding, corner radius, shadow and custom aspect ratios.
• Audio — mic and system stay on separate tracks all the way to export, so you rebalance them there instead of re-recording.

Idle-time auto-trim

The same voice-activity pass that produces captions also finds the stretches where nothing happened — no mouse movement, no audio — and offers to cut them. It offers; it does not do it silently.

Keyboard shortcuts

Every binding below is rebindable in Settings → Shortcuts. Keys shown are the Windows defaults; on macOS, Ctrl is Cmd.

Action	Shortcut
Stop recording	CtrlShiftR
Play / pause	Space
Delete selected item Removes the selected zoom, tracking layer, annotation or timeline segment.	DeleteBackspace
Deselect tool Clears the active crop, split or annotation tool — the Selection-tool reset you know from Premiere.	V
Toggle split mode	B
Save	CtrlS
Undo	CtrlZ
RedoCtrlY also works.	CtrlShiftZ
Deselect annotation In the editor — deselects the current annotation and disarms the active tool.	Esc
Cancel crop selection While choosing a recording region, before recording starts.	Esc

Packs

Cursor skins and wallpapers are loaded from folders rather than compiled in. Drop a pack folder into Clipio's packs directory and the app picks it up on next launch — the cursor skin picker and the background picker both read the same registry, so a pack that adds either shows up in the right place without any other wiring.

There is no pack store. It is a folder, on purpose.