The .seal format

Sealshot saves captures as .seal packages: the original, untouched pixels plus your annotations, stored together in one file. Recordings use the same container — a video .seal holds the movie plus its metadata.

Why a custom format?

Flat image files bake annotations into the pixels — once you export, an arrow can never be moved and a blur can never be adjusted. A .seal file keeps everything editable: reopen it next month and rearrange, restyle, or remove any annotation.

What’s inside

Alongside the original pixels and the annotation list, a .seal carries the capture’s own intelligence: the recognized OCR text (which powers library search), the automatic summary, Smart Keywords, and your tags, capture provenance (which app, when), and cached Extract Structured Data results.

The editing state rides along too: any inserted images, the enhanced and background-removed alternates of the base image (with which one you were showing), crop and focus area, and a ready-made composite and thumbnail so previews don’t have to re-render. Move a .seal to another Mac and all of it comes along.

With Enhanced Security on, the package contents are encrypted at rest.

One file, not a folder

A .seal is a single file. It used to be a folder that Finder displayed as one item, which meant every capture showed the same generic icon and copying one meant copying a directory. Now Finder shows each capture’s own picture, and a capture is one file to copy, move, or send.

Existing captures convert themselves quietly in the background — nothing to do, and everything keeps working while it happens.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Double-clicking a .seal in Finder opens it. One already in your library opens in place; one from anywhere else is copied in first — into your Library, or into Scratch if you have captures set to skip the Library — so opening a capture from a USB stick doesn’t leave you editing a file that may vanish. Captures brought in this way are dated as they arrive, so they appear where you would expect: newest in the Library and the recent strip.
• A protected capture shows no Finder preview. With Enhanced Security on there is nothing to see outside Sealshot, deliberately: the preview extension holds no keys and never asks for them.

File → Open Library Folder in Finder (⇧⌘O) takes you to the folder, as does the All Files row in the Library sidebar.

Exporting

When you need a standard file, export from the editor: a flattened PNG for images (⌘S), .mov/.mp4 for recordings, or an encrypted .sealshare package for sharing — see Sharing & export. The .seal original stays intact, so you can always re-export differently later.