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How do I take screenshots in Mac OS X?

Jonik
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sagarkothari
  • 5,085

9 Answers9

57
  • 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.

mipadi
  • 4,518
8

Applications -> Utilities -> Grab

Not as easy as Print Screen, but gives you some more options.

7

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.

Mike Kale
  • 241
7

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.

Telemachus
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3

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.

EvilChookie
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2

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.

Zoran
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1

If your not using Skitch, your doing it wrong. Serously, when it comes to grabbing an image, adding to it, sharing online, searching past clippings, or anything else screengrab related Skitch is far and away the best screen capture app out there for the Mac. And it's free

Don't believe me? watch the demo: Demo. In all seriousness this is close to my all time most essential OS X app.

Bryan Schuetz
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0
screencapture

Utility to take screenshots and screen recordings.

- Take a screenshot and save it to a file:
    screencapture path/to/file.png

- Take a screenshot including the mouse cursor:
    screencapture -C path/to/file.png

- Take a screenshot and open it in Preview, instead of saving:
    screencapture -P

- Take a screenshot and copy it to the clipboard, instead of saving:
    screencapture -c

- Take a screenshot of a selected rectangular area:
    screencapture -i path/to/file.png

- Take a screenshot after a delay:
    screencapture -T seconds path/to/file.png

- Make a screen recording and save it to a file:
    screencapture -v path/to/file.mp4
HappyFace
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0

the built in screen shot for mac is pretty good (as explain in other answer above, and I use that myself at home).

but if you would like a bit more control, a bit more options (a lot more actually), like taking video, or editing the screen-shots (remove sensitive information, adding numbers, arrows etc), then you should try Snagit it is not free, but I find that it is simply the best, and I use this at work all the time.

Sverre
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