Screenshot capture
Press ⌘⇧1 (default) anywhere on your Mac to capture a screenshot straight into an Ekorbia chat.
How it works
The hotkey invokes macOS’s native region selector — the same crosshair UI you already know from Cmd+Shift+4:
- Drag for a region
- Press Space to switch to window-capture mode
- Press Esc to cancel
When you complete a capture, Ekorbia immediately:
- Saves the PNG to your system temp directory
- Opens a new chat tab in the main window
- Attaches the screenshot to that tab as a vision attachment
- Switches to the new tab so you can start typing your question
You can then ask anything about what’s in the screenshot — “what does this error mean?” / “transcribe this whiteboard” / “what’s wrong with this layout?”
When you have a vision model installed
If your active model can see images, you’re good — type your question, send, and the model gets the screenshot as part of the request.
When you DON’T have a vision model active
Ekorbia handles this gracefully:
- A vision model is installed but isn’t your active model — Ekorbia auto-switches the new tab to a vision-capable model and shows a toast: “Switched to vision model: gemma3:4b”.
- No vision model is installed — A toast warns you the image will be ignored. To fix this, pull a vision model:
ollama pull gemma3:4b, then re-attach (or recapture).
Customizing the hotkey
Open Settings → General → Screenshot hotkey and click the current shortcut. Press the new combination — it’s recorded immediately. The shortcut is registered globally.
Pick something that doesn’t collide with macOS’s own shortcuts (notably Cmd+Shift+3, Cmd+Shift+4, Cmd+Shift+5).
Where the PNG file lives
The captured PNG is written to your system temp directory (/var/folders/.../T/). Ekorbia references it from the attachment store by path. Don’t delete the file before sending the first message — that’s when the bytes are read and base64-encoded into the request.
After the message is sent, the PNG can be safely deleted; macOS reclaims temp files on reboot in any case.
Workflow tips
- One-question screenshots: capture, type your question, get an answer, close the tab. Same flow as the overlay but with visual context.
- Annotated screenshots: take the screenshot, then drag-attach a separate annotated version on top (
paperclipbutton) — vision models can compare the two. - Combining with the memory file: if you frequently ask “explain this error message” type questions, add a system instruction in your Memory file like “When I attach a screenshot of an error, explain plainly what it means and give one concrete fix to try first.”
Related pages
- Images and vision models
- Quick-query overlay — sibling hotkey-driven feature
- Settings — for the screenshot hotkey