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Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier

(moocup.jaydip.me)
43 points jdsane | 12 comments | 22 Jun 25 07:54 UTC | HN request time: 1.29s | source | bottom

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 :)

1. asipasip ◴[22 Jun 25 09:16 UTC] No.44345350[source]▶
What is this for? I don't see the use case.
replies(3): >>44345522 #>>44346087 #>>44346124 #
2. zdc1 ◴[22 Jun 25 09:54 UTC] No.44345522[source]▶
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?
replies(3): >>44345577 #>>44345599 #>>44346321 #
3. Elfener ◴[22 Jun 25 10:07 UTC] No.44345577[source]▶
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.
replies(2): >>44345698 #>>44345702 #
4. benjaminwootton ◴[22 Jun 25 10:12 UTC] No.44345599[source]▶
Because it looks nice and makes it pop in a social media feed.
5. Hendrikto ◴[22 Jun 25 10:32 UTC] No.44345698{3}[source]▶
Some social media sites and apps like to cut off the sides to fit content onto different screen sizes and aspect ratios.

I think adding a border is an attempt to preserve the essential parts of the images in those situations. It really should not be necessary, but alas modern/stupid problems require modern/stupid solutions.

replies(1): >>44354293 #
6. jan_Sate ◴[22 Jun 25 10:33 UTC] No.44345702{3}[source]▶
so it's for drawing attention on social media?
7. brokariim ◴[22 Jun 25 11:43 UTC] No.44346087[source]▶
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
replies(1): >>44346129 #
8. rikroots ◴[22 Jun 25 11:53 UTC] No.44346124[source]▶
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

9. asipasip ◴[22 Jun 25 11:53 UTC] No.44346129[source]▶
But it's not a clean screenshot. There's a space-wasting gradient fill behind it.
10. jdsane ◴[22 Jun 25 12:24 UTC] No.44346321[source]▶
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.
11. al_borland ◴[23 Jun 25 10:47 UTC] No.44354293{4}[source]▶
This is a more generous explanation than my cynical first assumption, that they were trying to get away with saving lower res pictures to save on storage costs.
replies(1): >>44354763 #
12. jdsane ◴[23 Jun 25 11:47 UTC] No.44354763{5}[source]▶
It's optional you can turn it off at bottom floating navbar.