GUIDE
How to keep a screenshot on top of other windows
10 August 2026
You need to copy something off one window into another, and you are tired of alt-tabbing. Here is how to make a picture float above everything.
The free way: PowerToys Always On Top
Microsoft's own PowerToys is free, and its Always On Top module pins any window above the rest. Open the image in the Photos app, click its window, press Win + Ctrl + T, and it stays in front.
Windows has no built-in always-on-top for ordinary windows, so if you do not want another install, the honest alternative is snapping the two windows side by side with Win + ← and Win + →. Less convenient, nothing to download.
Where that falls short
Always On Top pins a window, not a picture. You get the whole Photos app — title bar, toolbar, background — floating over your work, and you cannot shrink it below whatever minimum size that app allows. There is no way to make it semi-transparent, so it hides whatever is behind it.
What Clarus adds
Press Pin on any capture card and the image itself becomes a frameless window that stays on top. No title bar, no app chrome — just the picture, at whatever size you drag it to.
The hover toolbar sets its opacity, so you can see through it onto the thing you are typing into, and its size. Arrow keys nudge it a pixel at a time, or ten with Shift, for lining it up against something underneath.
Lock freezes the position and size, which is the point once you have it where you want it: you can keep clicking around the pinned image without dragging it out of place by accident.
One limit worth knowing
Lock freezes the window's position. It does not make the pin click-through — clicks still land on the image rather than passing to whatever is behind it. A click-through version was built and then removed, because what people actually wanted was for the pin to stop moving, not to stop existing.
Which to choose
If you already run PowerToys and do not mind the app window around your image, Always On Top is free and does the job. Clarus is worth it if you want the picture alone, at any size, with opacity — and the pin one keystroke from the capture rather than four apps later.