No more trial clock
Blackbar used to give you fourteen days. That is the wrong shape for this tool. The only thing worth evaluating in a redaction tool is whether the redaction is real, and you cannot judge that in a hurry, least of all on the one engagement where you happened to install it.
From 1.1, opening images, detection, editing regions, previewing and pseudonyms are free, with no time limit, on every platform. A licence — $19, once — unlocks export: saving and copying the redacted image. You can run a whole engagement's worth of screenshots through detection before you decide whether it earns its place in your workflow.
A side effect people asked about: Blackbar no longer stores anything in your keychain. The one item it used to keep was the trial start date. Upgrading deletes it on first launch.
Licences now activate per device
A licence covers up to three of your devices, in any mix of macOS, Windows and Linux. Until now a key worked everywhere, forever, which also meant a key pasted into a chat worked for everyone in it.
Activation keeps the promise that matters most here: Blackbar itself still never goes online. Paste your key into Enter License… and choose Activate this device. Your browser opens getblackbar.com/activate with the key and a device code already filled in; paste the activation code it returns back into Blackbar, and that device is done for good. The device code is a one-way hash of the machine's identifier, and the activation is checked offline on every launch. Because the browser does the talking, an air-gapped machine can be activated from any other computer.
Replacing a laptop? Remove the old one at getblackbar.com/devices to free its slot. If you are upgrading from 1.0, your saved key carries over and Blackbar asks you to activate the device once.
A burn you can watch
The whole point of Blackbar is that it removes pixels rather than covering them — the difference explained in why blur and pixelation are not redaction. Until now that difference was invisible: you pressed export and a file appeared.
Export now runs a light sweep across the image. Behind the band, each detected region collapses into solid black, and what you see behind it is the exported bitmap itself, not a rectangle drawn over the original. The file is written the moment the band reaches the far edge, so the animation and the file agree about when the pixels were destroyed. If your system asks for reduced motion, the sweep is skipped and the export happens anyway.
The canvas now has exactly two states. A dashed amber outline means found, still
there; solid black means gone. Severity moved into the region list as
SECRET, ID, CTX and KEEP tags, so the
canvas never has to encode two things with one colour.
One editor on three platforms
Windows and Linux shared the detectors and the burn engine with macOS from the start, but not the editor. In 1.1 they get the same one: regions on the left, the image in the middle, an inspector on the right with the match, detector, pseudonym and style, and the same keyboard habits.
- Hold Space to see the burned result; release to keep editing.
- 1–4 switch the selected regions between solid, labeled, blur and pixelate. Blur and pixelate on a secret still ask first.
- Drag on the image to add a box; hold Alt (⌥ on a Mac) for a keep box that is never redacted.
- Midnight, Daylight and Hacker themes everywhere.
Detection now also runs as soon as an image arrives, the way it always did on the Mac, and you can open a screenshot straight from Finder, Explorer or your Linux file manager with Open With. On macOS, ⇧⌘2 uses Blackbar's own region picker instead of handing off to the system tool.
Nine languages
Blackbar follows your system language: Deutsch, Español (México), Français,
Italiano, Nederlands, Português (Brasil), 日本語, 한국어 and 繁體中文, plus English. A picker
in the app overrides it. Detector names such as JWT and AWS access key
stay in English on purpose: they are terms of art, and the command-line tool prints the same
names where output may be parsed.
A translated interface does not mean detection reads every script. That distinction matters enough to get its own article: redacting screenshots of non-English interfaces.
Getting it
All downloads are 1.1 today: macOS, Windows x64 and ARM64, and Linux x86_64 and ARM64. Every download is listed with its SHA-256 in the GPG-signed manifest — how to verify it. The full list of changes is in the changelog.