Frame timeline

A region capture isn’t just one frame. hypershot keeps a short burst of the moments leading up to your capture, and the editor’s frame timeline lets you pick the exact one you want.

How frames are kept

While the region capture overlay is open, hypershot records the screen in the background and keeps a rolling buffer of the most recent frames. When you release the mouse, the frames from the last 1 s (the default) before the release become the capture’s frames.

• Change the length in Settings → Captures → Capture window (0–5 s). At 0 (shown as Off) every capture is a single frame — see Capture Window
• Duplicates are dropped — identical and near-identical frames collapse into one, so a static screen or a paused video doesn’t produce a timeline of copies. If nothing changed, you get a single frame and no timeline
• Frozen captures are single frames — if you froze the screen (see Hold to Freeze), the capture is that frozen frame

Captures with more than one frame show a frame-count badge on their card in the preview folder.

Opening the timeline

The editor opens on the last frame — the moment you released. To pick a different one:

1. Click the Timeline button in the toolbar (or press F). The button only appears when the capture has more than one frame
2. A strip of frame thumbnails slides up above the toolbar, with a playhead on the current frame

Clicking an annotation or an empty part of the canvas switches back to the Select tool and hides the strip.

Choosing a frame

• Click a thumbnail to jump to that frame
• Drag along the strip to scrub — the canvas updates as the playhead moves
• ← / → step one frame back or forward while the Timeline tool is active

Changing the frame is undoable — a whole scrub counts as one step.

Annotations and frames

Annotations aren’t tied to a frame: they stay on the canvas as you switch frames, so you can draw first and pick the frame afterwards.

What gets exported

Copy, export, share, drag, and pin all use the current frame — whichever one the playhead is on. Saving the capture as a .hypercapture file keeps every frame along with the one you chose, so you can reopen it and pick again.

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See also: Area Capture | Hold to Freeze