Anonymark Practical Cookbook & Recipes

Step-by-step recipes for sanitizing application screenshots, batch-processing documentation assets, and integrating anonymark into release pipelines.

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Table of Contents

1. Recipe 1: One-Step Interactive Capture for GitHub Issues & PRs
2. Recipe 2: Sanitizing a Full App Screenshot with Synthetic Data
3. Recipe 3: Producing Explicit Redaction Pills for Security Audits
4. Recipe 4: Batch-Anonymizing a Directory of Documentation Screenshots
5. Recipe 5: Creating a macOS Raycast / Keyboard Maestro Quick-Capture Hotkey

Recipe 1: One-Step Interactive Capture for GitHub Issues & PRs

Scenario: You need to paste a screenshot of a live network tool, terminal window, or API client into a public GitHub issue without exposing your home subnet IPs or macOS username.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Run anonymark capture from your terminal:

   anonymark capture -out ~/Desktop/sanitized_issue.png
   

2. Your cursor turns into the native macOS crosshair (screencapture -i). Press Space to switch to window capture mode, or drag a rectangle over the target area.
3. As soon as you release the mouse button, anonymark runs Vision OCR on the temporary capture, replaces all private IPs, MACs, hostnames, and /Users/<you> paths in-place, and writes ~/Desktop/sanitized_issue.png.

Pro-Tip: Copy the resulting PNG directly to the macOS clipboard in one line:

anonymark capture -out /tmp/snap.png && osascript -e 'set the clipboard to (read (POSIX file "/tmp/snap.png") as TIFF picture)'

Recipe 2: Sanitizing a Full App Screenshot with Synthetic Data

Scenario: You already captured a high-resolution dark-mode window screenshot (raw_window.png) and want every IP, MAC address, and .lan hostname replaced with realistic synthetic equivalents that preserve the original font weight and background shade.

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Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Run anonymark process in synthetic mode (the default):

   anonymark process raw_window.png -out docs/assets/workbench.png -mode synthetic
   

2. Inspect the output image:
   • Subnet IPs are mapped deterministically to a single 10.0.<subnet>.<octet> range so host relationships remain coherent.
   • Vertically aligned sidebar rows snap to a uniform left margin and font size.
   • Adjacent status badges (such as Drift or warning triangles) remain untouched.

Recipe 3: Producing Explicit Redaction Pills for Security Audits

Scenario: For a compliance report or incident post-mortem, you want readers to see explicitly where sensitive identifiers were redacted rather than substituting synthetic names.

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Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Pass -mode pill to anonymark process:

   anonymark process raw_window.png -out audit_redacted.png -mode pill
   

2. Every detected hostname, IP address, and MAC address bounding box is replaced with a clean dark-gray pill (#505050) after erasing the underlying glyph ink.

Recipe 4: Batch-Anonymizing a Directory of Documentation Screenshots

Scenario: You have a folder of raw screenshots (raw_shots/*.png) for a documentation update and want to sanitize all of them into docs/assets/.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Run a simple shell loop over the input directory:

mkdir -p docs/assets
for img in raw_shots/*.png; do
  base="$(basename "$img")"
  anonymark process "$img" -out "docs/assets/$base" -mode synthetic
done

Recipe 5: Creating a macOS Raycast / Keyboard Maestro Quick-Capture Hotkey

Scenario: You want a global macOS shortcut (Cmd+Shift+6) that captures a screen region, anonymizes it in-place with anonymark, and places the sanitized image directly on your clipboard.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Create an executable script at ~/.local/bin/anonymark-clip:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
set -euo pipefail

TMP_OUT="/tmp/anonymark_clip_$$.png"
trap 'rm -f "$TMP_OUT"' EXIT

/usr/local/bin/anonymark capture -out "$TMP_OUT" -mode synthetic
osascript -e "set the clipboard to (read (POSIX file "$TMP_OUT") as TIFF picture)"

Make it executable (chmod +x ~/.local/bin/anonymark-clip) and bind it to a hotkey in Raycast, Alfred, or macOS Shortcuts.