Lumae is your free studio for polished screen recordings and screenshots.

Yes. No account, no card, no watermark. If pricing ever changes, it will be announced on the changelog well before anything happens.

macOS 26.0 or later. Lumae records through the newest ScreenCaptureKit output and transcribes captions with Apple's on-device speech models, and that is what sets the floor.

None of your work does. Recording, screenshots, rendering and caption transcription all run locally. Lumae makes two kinds of network request: a daily check for updates, which reads a small feed from GitHub, and anonymous usage statistics such as counts and durations, never names, paths, text or pixels. Turn those off in Settings › Privacy.

Yes. ⌥⌘3 captures a display and ⌥⌘4 an area or a window, from anywhere, and the same actions sit in the File menu and the menu bar item. Both open Lumae's capture selector, where you pick Display, Window or Area, and the picture opens in the annotation editor without the cursor in it. Draw arrows, rectangles, ellipses, highlights, spotlights, blur, text and numbered steps, crop, and frame the picture on the same backgrounds a recording uses. Every mark stays editable. Add ⌃ to either shortcut to copy the picture straight to the clipboard, or use Copy Image (⇧⌘C) and Export (⌘E) in the editor.

Yes, once. macOS lets an app read the screen only with that permission, so Lumae asks for it the first time you open it, and Settings › Permissions shows where it stands. The microphone and the camera are separate, each asked for only the first time you turn it on. Lumae's own windows stay out of whatever you capture, and system audio, the microphone and the camera are each switched on separately.

In ~/Movies/Lumae. Recordings are .lumae packages and screenshots are .lumaeshot packages in a Screenshots folder: the original media plus a small JSON description of the edits. Edits never rewrite the media, and older projects migrate forward automatically.

Recordings as MP4 or MOV with H.264 or HEVC, as ProRes in four flavours (422 LT, 422, 422 HQ and 4444) in a MOV for handing to an editor, or as a GIF. H.264 and HEVC take a Quality of Good, High or Best, expressed so one choice means the same look at 720p and at 4K; GIF gets its own frame rate, palette, dithering and looping. Everything exports at the project's canvas size or a smaller preset, and the sheet estimates the file first, except for a GIF, where how well a palette compresses is not predictable. Screenshots as PNG at the picture's own pixel density, or straight to the clipboard with Copy Image. Preview and export share one renderer, so they cannot diverge.

In-app, signed, with delta downloads. Lumae checks once a day; Lumae › Check for Updates… checks right away. If Lumae is running from your Downloads folder it will ask to be moved to Applications first.

Use the feedback form. Your Lumae and macOS versions, plus what you expected to happen, make most bugs quick to fix. Replies come from a person, not a ticket system.

The Model Context Protocol is how AI tools such as Claude Code and Claude Desktop call into other apps. Lumae is an MCP server: connect a client from Settings › MCP Server, which sets up Claude Code, Codex CLI, Claude Desktop or Cursor for you, and an agent can film a display, a window or an area, cut and zoom the take, draw annotations on it, add title cards, write captions, import media and export the video, through the same edit commands the interface uses. Every request is one undo step in the live editor, and a recording an agent starts shows the same countdown and floating controls as one you start. Moving the pointer on camera needs macOS's Accessibility permission as well. Screenshots are not exposed to agents yet.