What changed, release by release.

New

• Measure anything. A ruler whose ends cling to the nearest edge reads the distance between them, so a gap or a margin is measured to the pixel, on screenshots and videos.
• Draw freehand with a pen, on screenshots and videos.
• Emoji stickers. Click where one should go and pick any emoji; a symbol such as ★ or ✓ takes the colour of your marks.
• A library that works like Finder. Select several projects or screenshots at once, rename them in place, search them by name and make the cards bigger or smaller. Moving something to the Trash asks nothing, and Undo puts it back.
• Skim a project by moving the pointer across its card.
• Drop a video on the library to start a project with it, or a picture to annotate it, and drag a screenshot out into any app.
• New projects name themselves after what their first recording filmed.

Better

• Library cards show a video's length and whether it's open or recording.
• Look at a screenshot with Quick Look, or copy it, without opening it.
• Agents can draw rulers, pen strokes and stickers too.

Projects and screenshots opened with this version can't be opened by 0.14.1 or earlier.

Better

• A screenshot copied straight to the clipboard just says it's copied, with no thumbnail left to dismiss.

New

• A thumbnail after every screenshot. Each capture waits in a corner of the screen: copy it, save it, drag it into any app, look at it with Quick Look or open it to annotate. Thumbnails stack up, can follow you to another display and can close on their own after a while, or every capture can open straight in the editor instead.
• Freeze the screen while you choose a screenshot, to catch a menu, tooltip or hover state that would vanish as soon as you moved.
• Lines. Draw straight lines on screenshots and videos, and hold Shift to keep a line or an arrow level, upright or at 45°.
• Frame an area exactly. Its size and shape read out as you draw it, the arrow keys nudge it, and you can draw it from the centre or keep the canvas's shape. The next recording starts on the area you used last, and a retake on its clip's own area.
• Restart or discard a take from the recording controls, without stopping first.

Better

• The countdown plays over what you're about to record, and you can start at once or call it off without the keys reaching the app you're recording.
• Lumae steps out of the way while you record and comes back with the new clip when you stop. Recording a window brings its app to the front.
• The recording controls open beside what you record rather than on it, and show your microphone's level.
• You can still check the microphone and camera after framing an area.
• The camera preview sits on what you record, in its own shape, whatever you're recording.
• Copying or saving a screenshot shows that it worked.
• Window screenshots and recordings take the window at its current size, and screenshots keep the colours of the display it's on.
• Floating controls keep a clear edge and shadow over any background.
• The screenshot window keeps all its tools in view, and Lumae's windows fit on smaller displays.
• You can stop, restart or discard an agent's recording from the same controls as your own.

Projects and screenshots opened with this version can't be opened by 0.13.1 or earlier.

New

• Your camera and voice stay with their recording. What the camera and microphone recorded beside a clip now moves, trims, splits, speeds up and deletes with it, always in sync. A voice can still start before its picture or run on after it, and any take can be joined to a clip or set free by hand.
• Punch in narration and camera takes. A take recorded over the video starts where you are, replaces what it covers and stays with the picture it was recorded over. You can see what it will record over before you start.

Better

• Smooth playback and faster exports on long, high-resolution projects.
• A timeline that stays responsive with hundreds of clips and thousands of captions.
• Captions and titles break their lines the same way in the preview, at every size, as in the export.
• New screenshots of small pictures get a frame that fits them.
• When an edit can't be made, the message names the items as the timeline shows them.

Projects opened with this version can't be opened by 0.12.0 or earlier.

New

• Sharper zooms. Text and interface stay crisp when a zoom moves in close. Exports, stills and the paused preview are redrawn by Lumae's own upscaling model, trained on software interfaces, and it can be turned off for any project.
• Report a bug from the app. The bug report form is one click away.

Better

• Cleaner scaling at every size, in the preview and in exports.
• The pointer and annotations stay sharp under a zoom.
• Camera takes, captions, narration and music left past the end of the video after a cut can be moved back into it.

Projects opened with this version can't be opened by 0.11.0 or earlier.

New

• Your own colours and gradients. Save the colours and gradients you mix, and pick them again in any project or screenshot.
• A clearer inspector. Every panel is laid out the same way, so settings are easier to find, and each clip shows everything that belongs to it in one place.
• Tidier toolbars. The window's toolbar is simpler, and the timeline's tools are grouped by what they do.

Better

• Global resets are now available.
• The camera stays off until you ask to see its preview.
• Track names stay in view as you scroll the timeline.
• More consistent labels throughout.
• The inspector's tabs respond more reliably to clicks.

New

• Annotate your videos. Press A to draw on the video as it plays, with the screenshot editor's arrows, boxes, circles, highlights, blurs, labels and numbered steps, its keys and its colours. Marks sit in blocks on a new Annotations lane: each block's marks show together, fade in and out with it, and grow with a zoom along with what they point at. Split a block to make marks appear one after another.
• Spotlight. A new mark, in videos and screenshots, that dims everything but the part you want seen.
• Full-screen preview. Press F, or ⇧⌘F, to watch the video full screen, with play, skip, volume and a scrubber that step aside while it plays. Escape brings you back to the editor.
• Bigger marks. X-Large and Huge sizes, for marks that have to read when the video plays small.
• Agents can annotate. Agents connected over MCP can add, move, split and restyle annotation blocks.

Better

• Ten colours to mark with, and new marks start in the colour and size you used last, in either editor.

Projects and screenshots opened with this version can't be opened by 0.9.0 or earlier.

New

• Title cards. Press T to put a title on the timeline, with its own font, colour and reveal.
• Move the recording controls out of the way. Drag the recording pill anywhere it isn't covering your work; the next recording opens it there.
• The camera bubble makes way for the pointer. It fades as the pointer comes near, so you can see what you are clicking underneath.
• Drag past a neighbour. A narration take, a piece of music, a caption or a zoom can be dragged past the one next to it.

Better

• The camera and your voice start with the screen and end with the clip.
• Narration and camera takes recorded over the timeline line up with the picture they were recorded against.
• Recording goes ahead when the camera is set to Off or has been unplugged, and says what it recorded without.
• A camera take in progress is kept when you quit.
• A retake replaces only the camera and voice recorded with that clip.
• A new recording at the end of the video always has room for its camera and voice.
• You can keep editing while a narration or camera take records.
• Re-exporting replaces the old file only once the new one is complete.
• Sliders, drags and caption text behave the same however an edit ends.
• Agents connected over MCP get clear errors for arguments they mistype, and choose whether a recording films the camera.
• Many smaller fixes across recording, editing and export.

Projects opened with this version can't be opened by 0.8.0 or earlier.

Editing

• Fade between clips. A clip can rise out of the background and sink back into it, sound and all — set on the clip's page, or on every cut at once with Clip › Fade Between Clips.
• Pictures on the timeline. Drop in an image for an opening or a closing card; it shows for five seconds until you trim it, and is framed, zoomed and faded like any clip.
• Crop a clip after you recorded it. Press C, or choose Clip › Crop Clip, and drag the box: free, to the canvas, the original's shape, 16:9, 4:3 or square. The clip plays as if only that area had been filmed, its zooms keep looking at the same thing, and one click gives the same crop to the other clips of that recording. Nothing is re-encoded.
• Cut, copy and paste anything on the timeline — clips, zooms, camera takes, narration, music and captions, across lanes and between projects. A pasted recording keeps its drawn cursor and its clicks.
• Write a caption by hand at the playhead with ⌥⌘T, for a video with no narration to transcribe.
• Hide the pointer on one clip without hiding it everywhere.
• Speed goes from 0.25× to 24×, typed or dragged, for turning a long wait into a few seconds.
• Duplicate a project from its card or with File › Duplicate Project.

The look

• Lumae remembers the background you chose last, and the next project and the next screenshot start with it. Pictures you add are kept and offered again in every project and screenshot until you remove them.
• Windows are framed a little wider by default, and a recording of the whole screen fills the frame with square corners.

For agents

• Guides on demand. get_skill hands an agent the recording, editing and demo-direction guides when it needs them, so connecting costs a fraction of what it did and nothing is cut off.
• copy_items carries clips and the rest between projects, media, cursor and clicks included, so auto_zoom still finds the clicks afterwards.
• Fades, pictures (import_media with images: clip), a clip's own pointer and crops are all editable, and the clip summary reports them.

Fixes

• A project duplicated in Finder becomes a project of its own beside the original.
• A very small area recording lands in an empty project.
• An import that is not a video, a sound or a picture says so.
• A value out of range from an agent is refused with a clear error.

The camera

• Film yourself with the screen. Choose a camera in the capture bar and Lumae records it alongside the screen, onto a lane of its own, drawn as a bubble over the finished picture. A take can also be filmed against a timeline that is already cut, for a piece to camera after the fact.
• The bubble is yours to shape, in Inspector › Camera: circle, squircle, square or widescreen, a size, a corner and how far in from it, a ring, a shadow, and mirroring. Drag it on the preview and it re-anchors to the corner it lands nearest, so the drag and the sliders are one setting seen two ways.
• A single take can depart from the video's bubble in one property and inherit the rest, with the same amber badges and the same way back up as a clip's look.
• You can see yourself while you film. A floating bubble sits on screen through the countdown and the recording, in the shape and the corner the video will use.
• The bubble holds still under a zoom and sits under the captions, so a camera move never drags your face off the picture and text along the bottom stays readable.

Sound

• The microphone is a recording of its own now, landing on the narration lane, where it can be levelled, ducked and faded apart from the app's own sound.
• With the camera on, the face and the voice are written to one file by one session, so lip sync is exact. They arrive as two items — a camera take and a narration segment — free to be trimmed apart.

For agents

• An agent can film a demo now, not only edit one. It points start_recording at a display, a window or a rectangle of one, works the app while it runs, and stops; the clip lands in a project ready to cut. The countdown and the floating HUD show whoever started it, and the microphone stays off unless it is asked for, so nobody's room ends up in a take they did not narrate.
• perform_gesture moves the pointer the way a hand does — eased travel, a beat before each press, uneven keystrokes — for the moments that are on camera, where timing cannot be added afterwards. It runs only while a recording runs and ends with the take, and the recording can be polled and stopped while it moves.
• mark_moment names a beat as it happens, timed on the same clock the finished video is measured on, and stop_recording's trimToContent cuts the take down to what actually happened. Marks survive the cuts that remove them, reported with where their moment now falls.
• remove_range cuts a span out of the video and closes the gap in one call, keeping captions, narration and music in sync; several spans at once, each worked out against what the one before it left.
• transcribe returns every spoken word with its timing, on-device, and writes the captions only if you ask.
• import_media now takes a lane, so audio can land on narration as well as music, and an image becomes the video's background. list_projects says where a project actually is and which ones are open, and edit_project can answer with a short summary instead of the whole project.
• A recording, its trim and the edits after it come back one undo at a time.
• The camera lane is editable from here as well, take and bubble alike.

Around the app

• Renaming a project renames its folder, including a project opened from Finder and a rename that changes only the case of its own name.
• The library no longer flickers, and sits quietly when nothing is happening.
• Dragging carries everything selected across the free lanes, so a camera take and the narration beside it travel together, and Split cuts everything selected that can be cut at the playhead.

Fixes

• A clipboard screenshot captures the instant you press the key, and reaches the clipboard sooner.
• Automatic zoom holds a single frame where it could pulse between two identical ones.
• The cursor's invented travel across a jump stays inside the picture.
• A cut that leaves a clip too short at both ends removes it rather than failing the whole edit.
• import_media works from a sandboxed app again.
• A frame that cannot be read reports the real cause.
• The MCP client picker fits its window.

The timeline, rebuilt

• Clips show their footage. A clip wide enough for it tiles frames across its whole width instead of showing one poster at the left, with its name and details in a pill over them. A clip with sound carries its own waveform in a band along the bottom.
• Every block is tinted glass. Clips, zooms, narration, music and captions are Liquid Glass in their lane's colour with a shallow gradient over it, sitting in wells recessed a step below the pane. A block at rest sits back so the one you picked is the vivid one.
• Lane colours come from macOS now, so they follow Light and Dark Mode and Increase Contrast instead of staying fixed whatever the system does.
• Selection is the accent colour, the same cue as the playhead and the snap guides; it was a white outline before.
• The zoom under the playhead lights up, the way the caption showing now does, so it is clear which zoom is driving the frame and which one a drag on the preview will move.

Inspector

• The five tabs read like the toolbar's own buttons: a full-strength glyph at rest, and a white glyph on a solid accent capsule for the tab you are on. They were faint before, and in Dark Mode the selected one was blue on blue.
• The tabs dim along with the window when it is not the one you are working in, as the toolbar does.

Legibility

• The hint above the capture selector, and the recording HUD's "Recording starts…" and "Saving…" lines, were too faint on their glass. They are drawn at full strength now.

Music

• A Music track. Drop a song under a demo: it gets its own lane with a level, fade in and out, and ducking under narration, so the voice stays on top without riding a slider. The track has its own volume and mute beside the pieces on it.
• Music laid under a sequence keeps covering clips added later — a piece may run past the video's end, where it is cut, and its fade-out lands before the cut.
• Narration takes trim and fade like music. Drag a take's edge to shorten it, and give it the same fades.
• Waveforms are drawn from the audio itself — peaks as a halo under the body — so a long song cut into a short video shows the same detail as a short take.

One timeline

• Every lane now moves, trims, splits and snaps by the same rules. Captions gained handles and can be dragged; the Trim and Split tools and the arrow keys work on any lane; a drag snaps to the playhead, clip edges, neighbours and the ends, with a guide line where it is held.
• Voiceover, Music and Captions appear with their first item and leave with their last, the pane's height following them.
• Two takes can no longer sit on top of each other: a take is placed and cut to the room it has, the way a piece of music is.

Recording

• Choose the microphone, in the capture bar's Mic menu and in Inspector › Audio › Narration. A chosen device is remembered by name, so unplugging it falls back to the system default instead of silently switching; the choice covers both screen recordings and narration takes.
• The recording HUD morphs once from the countdown into the clock and then holds one shape, and it says Saving… while the file finalises instead of dropping the clock back to 0:00.

Around the app

• Rename a project by clicking its name in the title bar — a popover in the system's own style, Return to apply, Escape to cancel, one undo step. File › Rename… opens the same thing.
• A project that will not open is now named, with the reason, in a banner above the library, instead of quietly missing from the grid.
• The library's video tiles stay 16:9 whatever shape the recording is, instead of growing over their neighbours.
• If a save fails, the editor says so and keeps retrying, and quitting with a recording, export or transcription in flight now asks before it stops them.

Install

• brew install --cask matlegault/lumae/lumae. Homebrew leaves the installed app alone afterwards; Sparkle stays the only updater.

For agents

• An agent's edits register as their own undo steps, so four edits undo one at a time.
• move_item, trim_item and split_at place and cut any item with a drag's semantics and report where it landed; import_media puts audio files on the music track.
• The tool list is 36% smaller (94 KB to 60 KB) — the command schema is sent once per connect rather than three times.
• A long export no longer holds every other call behind it, arguments are bounded so a bad number cannot take the app down, and a request in flight when the app quits gets an answer instead of hanging.

Fixes

• A GIF is now quantised against the whole clip, not its opening seconds, and plays at the right speed when its frame rate is above the project's.
• Cancelling an export no longer risks a hang or a crash, and a cancelled export cannot disturb the next one.
• Generating captions no longer fails entirely when two spoken lines nearly collide.
• A clip, a zoom or a time that the model cannot hold is now refused with a message instead of trapping — on a tool call, and when a project is read from disk.

Export, rebuilt

• ProRes and GIF. All four ProRes flavours (Proxy, LT, 422, 4444) for handing footage to an editor, and animated GIF for anywhere a video will not play.
• A real Quality control for H.264 and HEVC, set so one choice means the same look at 720p as at 4K.
• The panel asks the format question twice — family first, then the flavour only ProRes needs — and every picker is a row of buttons instead of a menu. Which settings appear follows the format: quality for the lossy codecs; frame rate, palette, dithering and looping for GIF.
• Size estimates now say what they are worth: ProRes is measured and reads About, H.264 and HEVC read Up to, since the encoder undershoots hard on simple content.
• The save panel remembers where you were. Video and screenshot exports each keep their own last folder instead of snapping back to Movies and the Desktop.

Pointer

• A clip's pointer is now a choice of four: hidden, as recorded, a drawn arrow, or a touch circle for showing a tap the way a phone would.
• The click ripple was resized and resoftened, and the arrow now carries across a cut instead of flickering at one.

Zoom focus

• The zoom page has a Focus section: a map of the clip's own frame with the window the zoom looks through drawn on it. Drag the window to move the focus, or click outside it to send it there.
• A following zoom draws its camera dashed at the playhead; dragging it takes over by hand.
• The hint that used to sit on the video is now a help tag that appears while you drag, or after the pointer rests on the picture — so the preview is clear for a screenshot.

Audio

• Each narration segment has its own volume. Takes recorded at different distances from the microphone can be evened out without re-recording. The Audio tab's gain still applies over the top.

Capture and overlays

• The capture bar carries both audio sources — they were buried in a submenu, where a wrong microphone is only discovered after the recording — and a gear holding the countdown and the smooth cursor. Taking a screenshot shows the modes and Cancel alone.
• Every floating surface now shares one chrome: the same corner, inset and shadow, following your Light or Dark setting.

Backgrounds

• Fourteen new bundled backgrounds, in light and dark variants, drawn from Big Sur through Tahoe.

For agents

• Lumae's MCP server is listed in the official MCP registry, so a client can find it without being told where to look.

Fixes

• A muted clip after a louder one faded in across its whole length on export instead of staying silent.
• Two overlays painted white labels on a material that goes pale in Light Mode — the selection's size readout was white on white. Overlays are now clamped to stay legible over whatever is behind them.
• The recording HUD lost its shadow on all four edges.

Looking closer

• Both editors zoom now. Pinch or hold ⌥ and scroll to magnify the video preview or a screenshot, scroll to pan once something is off screen, and two-finger double tap for actual size and back.
• ⌘+ and ⌘− step through round percentages, ⌘0 fits and ⌘1 is actual size — also in View ▸ Zoom.
• The indicator in the corner of the canvas reads the current percentage and opens a menu of levels. It stays quiet while the canvas is fitted and tints once you look closer.
• Past 400% a screenshot shows its own pixels instead of smoothing them, so you can check an edge or a character.
• On a screenshot, hold space and drag to pan by hand; every tool keeps the mouse.

This is the view only. It changes nothing about what you export, and the zooms you add to a clip are untouched.

Fixes

• The inspector's background no longer bleeds into the title bar, which used to show the preview's darker tone on one side and the panel's lighter one on the other. A hairline runs under the bar across the whole window instead.
• Copied to Clipboard stays legible over bright content.

Editing

• Clip speed. Play any clip from 0.25× to 4× with its pitch kept. Its media and its zooms stay where they are; the rest of the timeline re-times around it.
• A look per clip. Background, padding, corners and shadow can now depart from the video on a single clip, with a reset and Apply to All Clips to bring everything back in line.
• Motion. Zoom defaults live in one place: the scale new zooms start at, how long they ease, and the shape of that ease (Gentle, Standard, Snappy). Each zoom inherits until it sets its own.

Inspector

• Redesigned in two layers: tabs about the whole video, and a page about whatever you select in the timeline. Escape, the back button and a click on empty track space all return.
• Clicking the preview selects the clip under the playhead; clicking the background around it opens Frame.
• Captions are selectable in the timeline, and each zoom now has a page of its own.

Look and feel

• Liquid Glass in the inspector's tabs, the transport and the playhead, which shows its timecode while you drag it.
• The capture selector's panels are rounded to the controls inside them, and its instruction stays readable over light content.

• Global keyboard shortcuts. Take screenshots and start or stop recordings from any app, even with no Lumae window open. Set them in Settings › Shortcuts, where you can also hand macOS's ⇧⌘3, ⇧⌘4 and ⇧⌘5 to Lumae.
• Capture the way macOS does. ⌥⌘3 grabs the display at once; ⌥⌘4 shows a crosshair with coordinates to drag an area, Space picks a window, and a toolbar switches between Display, Window and Area. Recordings use the same selector, with an adjustable area and a Record button.
• Record an area of the screen (⌥⌘6), framed while it records.
• Add ⌃ to copy. ⌃ with a screenshot shortcut copies the picture to the clipboard instead of opening it, like ⌃⇧⌘4; it stays in the library too.
• Clean window screenshots, with transparent corners and nothing overlapping.
• Lumae now asks for the Screen Recording permission once, at first launch, with a short guide; Settings › Permissions shows the state.
• Settings › MCP Server prints the setup for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Claude Desktop and Cursor, each with a copy button.
• The Dock icon shows only while a window is open. Requires macOS 26.0.

Agents can now see, aim and finish. Four additions to the MCP server, for anyone driving Lumae from Claude Code, Claude Desktop or another MCP client:

• render_frame and sample_frames return pictures: the composed frame exactly as the export would show it (background, framing, zoom, cursor, captions), the raw recording underneath, or a labelled grid of several frames to survey a whole project in one image. preview_edit can render what a change would look like before it is applied.
• Clicks in get_project: every clip lists where and when the recorded cursor clicked, in timeline and media time and in frame coordinates, so an agent can aim a zoom without looking.
• auto_zoom: the toolbar's Automatic Zoom as a tool, with its lead-in, tail and magnification adjustable.
• export_project: renders the video to a file under ~/Movies (default ~/Movies/Lumae Exports/<project>.mp4), with codec, container and size options, and returns the path when done.

Frames only travel to your agent; analytics still receive no images, results or text. Full guide: docs/MCP.md.

Agents can edit your projects. Lumae is now a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Connect Claude Code, Claude Desktop or any MCP client and ask it to cut clips, add zooms, write captions, import media or undo, in plain language. Every change an agent makes goes through the same editing engine as your own clicks: it shows up live in the editor, is one step in Edit ▸ Undo, and autosaves.

• Settings › Automation shows the server command and copies the setup for Claude Code (claude mcp add lumae -- …) or Claude Desktop. Lumae launches on its own when a client connects.
• Tools: list_projects, get_project, open_project, edit_project (every edit command, applied atomically), preview_edit, import_media, split_at, add_zoom_at, undo, redo, describe_commands.
• Built on the official MCP Swift SDK. Not yet: exporting, recording, screenshots.

Analytics

• Agent sessions are reported in the shape of PostHog's MCP Analytics: which tools were called, how long they took, error categories, the shape of the arguments with all text removed, and the one-sentence reason the agent gives for each call. Never the results, the project, or anything you typed. Settings › Privacy says exactly what is shared and lets you turn it off.
• Fixed: usage statistics were only sent when Lumae quit; the periodic send cancelled itself.

Full guide: docs/MCP.md in the repository.

• Take screenshots: File ▸ Take Screenshot… (⇧⌘N) or the menu bar item captures a window or a display through the system picker, with no Screen Recording permission needed.
• Mark them up without touching the picture: arrows, rectangles, ellipses, highlights, blur, text, numbered steps and a crop. Every mark stays editable later.
• Frame a screenshot the way you frame a video: the Look button offers the same colour and image backgrounds, padding, corners and shadow.
• Copy Image (⇧⌘C) puts the finished picture on the clipboard and Export… (⌘E) saves a PNG.
• Screenshots live in the library beside your recordings, under a new Screenshots section.
• Recordings of windows with rounded corners no longer show a dark rim along the edge.

• Zooms can follow the cursor: turn on Auto for a zoom and the camera pans to keep the pointer in view. Drag the preview to take over by hand.
• New backgrounds in the Look inspector: image presets such as Graphite, Midnight, Ocean and Aurora, or an image of your own.
• Colours now pass through unchanged from recording to export, and exports are tagged so QuickTime and browsers show them the same way.
• The recorded cursor is drawn from the system's vector artwork, so it stays sharp at any zoom.
• Motion blur during zooms stays centred on the sharp image instead of pushing edges outward.
• The clip inspector is tidier: trim details appear only when a clip is trimmed, and media information is condensed.
• Lumae now sends anonymous usage analytics to help improve it: counts and durations, never names, paths, text or pixels. Turn them off in Settings › Privacy.

• Lumae now comes as a disk image: drag it into Applications to install.
• When Lumae runs from somewhere else, such as the Downloads folder, it asks to be moved to Applications so it can keep itself up to date.

The first beta.

• Record a window or a display from the menu bar, with your microphone if you want it. Lumae's own windows stay out of the recording.
• Edit on a timeline: zooms that follow the action, or one click for automatic zooms from your clicks, a smooth synthetic cursor with motion blur, padding and backgrounds, captions.
• Export a polished video. Edits never re-encode the original recording.
• Projects are .lumae packages in your Movies folder.
• Lumae checks for updates once a day, or right away from Lumae › Check for Updates…