Annotate vs Papyrus

Annotate helps you quickly mark up screenshots and images with clean, readable shapes and text - built for fast, polished results on iPhone and iPad. • 17 tools: Crop, Blur, Pixelate, Text, Number, Stamp, Rect, Oval, Arrow, Pen, Marker, Highlight, Loupe, Backdrop, Image, GIF, Watermark • Clean shapes and highlights, plus freehand pen and marker • Animated GIFs - bring your screenshots to life: search KLIPY right in the editor, drop a GIF on the canvas, and your export turns into a video. Powered by KLIPY • Text with font, size, alignment, and optional background • Number badges and SF Symbols stamps (with search) • Blur or pixelate areas, and use a loupe to magnify details • Auto-Redact: detect and hide sensitive info in one tap - credit cards, phone numbers, emails, license plates, and faces • Full control over style: stroke width, fill, outlines, shadow, opacity, configurable arrowheads, and more • Free rotation - turn shapes, text, stamps, images, GIFs, and more to any angle with a precision dial • ∞ Layers: one layer per annotation - select, reorder, and delete • Helpful extras: snapping for neat alignment, undo/redo, zoom to fit/100% • Apple Pencil ready - palm rejection kicks in automatically so the Pencil draws while your fingers still pan and pinch • Grow the canvas - add space on any edge to make room for callouts and shapes • Backdrop styles - frame your screenshot with gradients or solid colors, and choose whether the backdrop pads the canvas or fits inside it • Watermark - add text or a logo across the whole image (tiled) or in a corner to brand and protect your work • Templates - save a set of annotations, backdrop, and watermark, then reapply them to any image; positions adapt to the new aspect ratio • Start from Photos, Files, clipboard, or a blank canvas - or pick an iOS device preset (iPhone 17, iPad Pro, etc.) • Export and share fast (PNG, JPEG, or HEIC) • Shortcuts - run Auto-Redact and Framing from the Shortcuts app, Spotlight, and Siri Test free for the first 5 annotated images. Annotate is brought to you by the developer of Dropshare - the file sharing app for macOS and iOS.

Papyrus is a native research workspace for reading, annotating, organizing, and citing PDFs — built for iPad, iPhone, and Mac. READ AND ANNOTATE Open a paper in a fast built-in reader. Highlight, underline, and mark up pages, and every highlight stays searchable and linked back to its source. Bookmark a page as you go, and pick the paper up later from a Reading card that remembers where you stopped. On iPad, a References tab looks up the open paper's reference list and related work, so you can follow a citation trail and add what matters to your library without leaving the page. WRITE ON THE PAGE WITH APPLE PENCIL Mark up a PDF directly on iPad — annotate a proof, sketch beside a figure, work a derivation out in the margin. Your ink belongs to the paper and travels with it, encrypted, to your other devices. NOTES BESIDE THE SOURCE Keep Markdown notes next to each paper: headings, tables, code blocks, LaTeX math, and [[note]] cross-references. Notes stay with the paper and export as PDF when you need to share them. NOTEBOOKS Gather notes from across your library onto themed shelves — a topic, a chapter you're drafting, a reading group. Filing a note copies nothing and moves nothing: it still belongs to its paper, still says which paper that is, and one tap takes you there and back. A note can sit on several shelves at once. Fill a new shelf from what you've already written, search it by a note's text or by the paper behind it, order it four ways — including oldest paper first, which reads your own notes forward through the literature — and export a whole shelf as one Markdown document. All Notes lists everything you've written in one place, filed or not. ORGANIZE THE WAY YOU THINK Folders — a paper can live in several — plus tags, star ratings, and seven colored flags you can name yourself, each with its own shape so they stay tellable apart at a glance. Smart Collections keep themselves current from rules you set, including flag rules. Review Duplicates finds look-alike papers and merges each set after you confirm, combining tags, folders, projects, notes, and highlights. FIND ANYTHING Search titles, authors, notes, and highlights — or the full text inside your PDFs. TURN READING INTO WRITING Projects are where a reading pile becomes a manuscript. Group the papers behind a chapter or article, give each one a role, and capture evidence — claims, quotes, and your own interpretation — tied back to the source paper and page. Write the project note from a template (related work, method comparison, experiment plan, thesis chapter, reviewer response), keep its revision history, and run a preflight that catches missing citation keys and metadata gaps before you export. Export a bundle with Markdown, a BibTeX bibliography, and the PDFs. IMPORT AND CITE Bring in PDFs, whole folders, or BibTeX and RIS files — including libraries exported from Mendeley and Zotero. Papyrus looks up metadata by DOI or arXiv ID and fills in the details. Save papers straight from Safari with the included extension. Copy citations in the style you write in, and export BibTeX or RIS whenever you need them. READ ANYWHERE Paste an arXiv link, a DOI, or a PDF URL and Papyrus imports it, looks up the details, and fetches the PDF. Add a paper to Read Later and its PDF downloads ahead of time, so a flight or a commute doesn't need a signal. Ask Siri, or search from the Home Screen, to pick up the paper you were last reading on the page you left it. YOUR LIBRARY, YOUR DEVICES Your library syncs over iCloud across iPad, iPhone, and Mac. No account to create, no tracking, no ads. Free to download and use — every feature included, no in-app purchases, no subscription.