How to take screenshots in Mac OS X?

Question

How do I take screenshots in Mac OS X?

Solution 1

• Command + Shift + 3 takes a picture of the whole screen;
• Command + Shift + 4 takes a picture of a portion of the screen;
• Command + Shift + 4, then Spacebar, allows you to take a picture of a particular screen element (a window, the Dock, the menubar, etc.)

If you want to put the screenshot on the clipboard (rather than creating an image file), hold down control while pressing the key combo.

Solution 2

You can press Cmd-shift-3 to dump the whole desktop as an image in your ~/Desktop folder, or Cmd-shift-4 to grab a sub area. Hit Cmd-shift-4 then press the spacebar to switch to grabbing a whole window.

There's also /usr/sbin/screencapture if you want to script it, etc.

Solution 3

If you're a command-line junkie, check out man screencapture. It's surprisingly full-featured.

For example:

# Capture interactively - allow you to grab a portion of the screen
# Save item as snap.jpg
screencapture -i snap.jpg

# Capture interactive and open immediately in Preview
screencapture -iP snap.jpg

There are also options to pop the snap into a Mail.app right away (if you use that), for time delay, for including or removing the cursor, for window based or selected captures and so on.

Solution 4

If you are taking screenshots a fair bit, I reccomend LittleSnapper. Fantastic piece of software, and it can hide away in your menu bar and supports publishing to flickr, etc.

Solution 5

Jing is pretty good at this: http://www.jingproject.com/ The CMD+SHIFT+(3 or 4) is OK, but extremely limited.

I've assigned a CTRL + PRINT SCREEN keyboard shortcut for Jing, it's much more effective than the default. Plus, you can annotate the screenshots you take. I also turn off the 'little sun orb' thing, that's just a useless gimmick. But once you set it up, Jing can prove to be very powerful.

I also have Little Snapper (from a bundle), but it's much less mature and has a few annoying quirks.

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Comments

[Louis Gerbarg]

No ctrl is necessary in any of those

[Admin]

@Louis Gerbarg If you don't use control it will create an image file on your desktop, if you do it will only copy it to the clipboard

[Telemachus]

It's close to your "all time most essential OS X app"? How many screenshots do you take in a day?

[Bryan Schuetz]

A lot, all day long. To get feedback on design work by sharing an image with the team, to trouble shoot problems people might be having by sending them a screenshot of a settings pane, to just share random coolness on the web via twitpic, etc. I use skitch all day long.

[George2]

On Windows I use mspaint for simple graph process, on MacBook Pro, what tools to use?

[George2]

Thanks! I find Acorn is not free, do you mean the one called "ACorn for free"?

[George2]

Thanks Mike! Question answered! I have started another discussion for image editing software from superuser.com/questions/141020/… appreciate if you could help further there. :-)