ShadowClip, an app that removes personal data from screenshots before you share them, is free on the App Store for a limited time. New Mobile Life reports that it normally costs US$0.99, and the App Store listing now shows it as free for iPhone, iPad and Mac. No end date is given, so the offer could end at any time.

The app is aimed at anyone who pastes screenshots into emails, chats or AI tools. It works on Macs with macOS 14 or later and iPhones with iOS 17 or later, according to the developer’s site.

What it detects

ShadowClip scans an image and lists what it found, so you can accept, dismiss or add items before saving. The App Store page lists:

  • API keys and tokens in more than 20 formats
  • Credit card numbers and IBANs, each checked against its own check digit to avoid false alarms
  • National ID numbers for 29 countries, each matched to its own format
  • Email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses
  • IPv4, IPv6 and MAC addresses
  • Faces, QR codes, barcodes, names, organisations, places, dates of birth and handwritten signatures

You can also select words by hand or draw a box over anything else. The interface comes in 17 languages, and it checks text in 30, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian and Thai.

Privacy by design

The developer says ShadowClip contains no networking code and makes no network requests, so images never leave the device. Redactions are solid fills in a new image, with the original pixels thrown away rather than covered, and location and camera data are removed when you save. A share extension lets you redact from Photos, Safari or other apps without opening ShadowClip first.

How to get it

  1. Open the ShadowClip page on the App Store.
  2. Check that the price shows as free before you tap Get.
  3. On a Mac, you can also use the Finder Quick Action, according to the developer.

One limit to know: the developer notes that Apple’s text recognition cannot read Hebrew, Greek or Hindi, so ShadowClip marks that text on the image for you to check by hand. At 5.3 MB, the app is a very small download.