Toast stack — why annotations float

The toast stack is the row of small annotation cards at the bottom-right of your screen. Each card is a screenshot you've taken in this session that hasn't been dismissed yet.

If you've used Loom for video, the pattern is familiar — a captured artifact lives at the edge of your screen until you're done with it. DrawShot uses the same idea for screenshots.

This page explains what the toast stack does, why it exists, and how the persistence works so you trust it.

What it looks like

After your first capture, a small card slides up from the bottom-right corner. The card shows:

• A thumbnail of your screenshot (with any annotations overlaid)
• The capture time (e.g. "10:42")
• A close button
• A "✓ saved" indicator if you've pressed ⌘S

Click the thumbnail → the annotation canvas re-opens, preserving every annotation you've made so far.

Take another screenshot? A new card slides up next to the old one. The stack scrolls left as it fills — most recent on the right.

Why a stack and not a single window

The thing that surprised me from user research: 5 of 7 people interviewed had lost annotations mid-edit. Switching apps, hitting Esc by accident, the editor app crashing — every case ended with starting the annotation over from scratch.

The pattern that works:

• Annotations are never trapped inside a single window
• Annotations persist to disk as you make them
• Switching to Slack to grab a teammate's name and coming back shouldn't lose your work

The toast stack solves all three. The annotation canvas is just a viewer over the toast — closing it doesn't destroy anything.

How persistence works

Every annotation you make is written to disk as you make it. Concretely:

~/Library/Application Support/DrawShot/
└── sessions/
    └── 2026-05-15-104207/
        ├── original.png            ← raw capture
        ├── annotations.json        ← annotation state, updated every keystroke
        └── rendered.png            ← cached merged version

The annotations.json is the source of truth. Every undo, redo, color change, text edit appends to it. If DrawShot crashes mid-edit, your next launch reads the last annotations.json and the toast stack repopulates exactly where you left off.

If you press ⌘S, rendered.png gets flattened and copied to ~/Pictures/DrawShot/ with a human-readable filename.

If you dismiss the toast without saving, the session folder gets deleted after 24 hours (configurable in Preferences → Privacy → Session retention).

Dismissal rules

A toast goes away when:

1. You click the × on the card.
2. You quit DrawShot (the session is preserved on disk — relaunch and the toast comes back).
3. The session retention timer expires (default 24h after dismissal click).

A toast does not go away when:

1. You press ⌘S — the file is saved, but the toast stays in case you want to keep editing or copy again with ⌘C.
2. You close the annotation canvas with ⌘W or Esc — only the canvas closes; the toast stays.
3. macOS goes to sleep / your laptop closes.
4. DrawShot crashes.

How many toasts can stack?

There's no hard limit — DrawShot can show as many as fit in your screen width. After ~8 cards, the stack starts horizontally scrolling. Hover the stack to see the scroll affordance.

In practice, if you're seeing more than 10 toasts at once, you're probably forgetting to dismiss them. Press ⌘⇧⌫ on each one, or Preferences → Toast stack → Auto-dismiss after save to clear them automatically once saved.

Keyboard control

The toast stack is keyboardable, not just clickable:

This means you can ⌘⇧2 → annotate → ⌘C → ⌘⇧2 → annotate → ⌘C over and over without ever touching the mouse. The toast stack is just the visual record of what you've done.

Why not a Finder window?

DrawShot could just save every capture to ~/Pictures/DrawShot/ and let you find it in Finder. Many tools do that. The reason it doesn't:

Most screenshots are messages, not files. ~80% of captures in user testing were taken to send to someone, and the file was never reopened after. Saving every shot to disk pollutes Pictures and creates an organizational tax the user has to pay.

The toast stack is ephemeral by design — a transient holding pen for in-flight work. Save the ones that matter (⌘S), drop the rest.

drawshot.dev · v1.0 · macOS 13+ · free