Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier

Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier moocup.jaydip.me/...

I’ve always seen talented designers and developers post their work, only for it to get lost in the noise. I realized a major reason is that they often just post a simple, unstyled screenshot. As a result, nobody pays attention.

My solution is a tool where you can drop in a screenshot, pick from a collection of hand-picked gradients, style it, and export it—all in a few seconds. I’ve carefully designed every element of the app to be efficient, simple, and intuitive.

On making it "Free, Forever": I don't plan on ever charging a subscription for Moocup. I dislike the subscription model as much as you do. Instead, my plan is to include a donation option for those who wish to support the project. This allows me to keep my promise of making the app free and useful for everyone, without being burdened by hosting and maintenance costs.

My goal is simple: to provide a high-quality tool that is genuinely useful and doesn't waste your time. If you find it helpful, the best thing you can do is share it with others. I've included all my contact links for feedback and suggestions.

Happy designing :)

What is this for? I don't see the use case.

zdc1 · 3 months ago

I'm equally confused. Why would I want to take a perfectly good screenshot and then shrink it down so it fits within a square and fill >50% of the canvas pixels with a gradient background?

Elfener · 3 months ago

I think this is some (new?) social media trend, my school started doing it too with their images on facebook. Half the image is just a border so the actual image is really low res. I have no idea why they do it though.

jdsane · 3 months ago

this is current way of showing design screenshots, as plain screenshots gets buried under and most of the time designer, or frontend devs generate their own workflow for handling this grunt work of beautifying their work. it's tool to remove that pain point.

benjaminwootton · 3 months ago

Because it looks nice and makes it pop in a social media feed.

rikroots · 3 months ago

I can maybe see some value for opening a web page like this, then taking a set of screenshots (for me CMD+SHIFT+4) which automatically get added to the web page, which the user can then curate in some way to generate a final image for download. If the dev who built this web page can work out a way to get the web page to automatically ingest user screenshots while the page is open then I think this tool becomes a lot more interesting.

I did a similar thing for generating a video from multiple screen captures - GitHub repo here: https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder

brokariim · 3 months ago

As a dev who loves sharing stuff on X, this is super useful. You can use it to post clean screenshots for: - showing off a new UI component you built - sharing code snippets or errors with context - bug reports that don’t look like chaos

asipasip · 3 months ago

But it's not a clean screenshot. There's a space-wasting gradient fill behind it.

Deleted Comment

erikgahner · 3 months ago

Looking good! What does it mean that it is free forever? That the code is available on GitHub and we should not have to be concerned about the site going offline or moving to a different place (that is not free)? Or, if it takes off, that we should begin to see ads? Or that this is the free tier option and future iterations can expect you to pay to, say, remove a watermark?

this is free in the sense that users don't have to worry about paying a dime for using it. i have no current plan for any kind of monetization. it's my hobby tool that i use and expect people to use without worrying.

bapak · 3 months ago

> free forever

conflicts with

> no current plan

ezekg · 2 months ago

I was recently looking for something like this to share some fun screenshots of a new UI. Would be cool to see some depth of field or bokeh effects.

ravdar · 2 months ago

nice! I was looking for a tool like this a while ago. All I could find were either nice paid ones or some pretty crappy free options. I have to shamefully admit I ended up using the free version of Pika and just cropped out the watermark :D Yours looks solid and free. I'd suggest adding a few things like slider for corner radius, shadows, and frames (like macOS, browser, etc.)."

jdsane · 2 months ago

glad you liked it. In bottom navbar, there is "Border" section where you can adjust border radius, color. If possible follow me on my socials so I can provide updates and receive feedback. my dm's are always open :)

thih9 · 3 months ago

Looks great, congrats on the launch.

Could you tell us more about how you made it? What libraries did you use, or did you code it with an AI?

DrHoenikker · 3 months ago

This is a frame generator. It accepts images, assumed to be screenshots, as an input.

yup, that's exactly right.