1/24/23
9:00 am

10 Variations On How To Take Screenshots On a Mac

If you take a lot of screenshots, check out these productivity tips to make your captures go to the folder you want, save to a different location each time, go straight to the clipboard, go into the Photos app, and more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. If you don't like the process of taking screenshots on your Mac there are ten variations that may work better for you.
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So to take a screenshot on your Mac you may be used to using the default keyboard shortcut Shift Command 3. That takes a screenshot of your Mac and gives you a floating thumbnail at the bottom right. You can click on that to mark it up or just wait and it will appear on your desktop as a file. But perhaps that's not the best workflow for you. There are a lot of different variations. You just need to know where to go to find screenshot settings and then some different shortcuts and commands to use while taking a screenshot. 
So first let's go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard. Then go to Keyboard shortcuts. Now there is a section here just for Screenshots. Now you're going to see five different shortcuts here. Maybe more if you've got a Mac with a Touch Bar. There at the top is the default, Save picture of screen as a file, Shift Command 3. But then there is some other variations as well that we're going to look at. But the one we're going to start with is the last one, Screenshot and Recording Options. This is the one keyboard shortcut to rule them all. It doesn't just allow you to set the options but you can actually use this to take screenshots. So if you're really into screenshots and you want to have all the options available when you do, then Shift Command 5 is the one you want to use..
But first we're going to use it to access the settings. Shift Command 5 brings up the special screenshot control at the bottom and then you've got the Options Button right here. Click that and this is where you can highly customize how screenshots are taken. The first thing we're going to do is get rid of that floating thumbnail. If you don't ever use it it just takes up some time while it's shows you that thumbnail and waits for you to click on it. If you'd rather have it just Save the file immediately you just Uncheck it right there. Now you can see I don't have it selected anymore. Now the next time I use Shift Command 3 it immediately takes the screenshot and puts it on my Desktop. 
Even if you're not a fan of that floating thumbnail you may want to give it a second look. Let's turn it back On here and see what happens when we capture the screen. If I click on it it brings up a Preview of the screenshot. Now this might seem like a waste of time since if you Dismiss it with the X button here at the top left or just click Done then it just Saves it to the Desktop anyway. But you also have this Trashcan Button here. If you click that then it doesn't do anything. So this gives you a chance to checkout the screenshot before you save it. So instead of taking a screenshot, then having to open up the file, check it out, see that maybe you didn't get it quite right, deleting that file and trying again. You could just do it this way, click here, and if you don't like it click the Trashcan. Now you're ready to try again. No file was ever saved. Plus, of course, you also get the ability to markup the screenshot. You get the ability to Share it directly from here so you could decide, instead of saving it that you want to send it, say, in a message or in an email. You even get the ability here at the bottom right to select text that is found in the screenshot. So, for instance, if you take a screenshot of this and you use the floating thumbnail then you can select the text, Command C to Copy, and then throw away the screenshot. Then you can past the text into a document. 
Now a request I often hear is to not have the screenshot saved to the Desktop. You can actually save them anywhere. Shift Command 5 and under Options you could see you could have it saved to the Desktop or Documents. But you can also choose Any Other Location. So I can go, say, to my Home folder here. I can maybe go into Pictures, maybe create a new folder there called Screenshots and then choose that.  So now when I capture a screenshot it will be saved into that folder instead of the Desktop.
Now another thing people want to do is to have the screenshot saved to a different location each time. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do this. But if you look at the options here one of them is to Save to Preview. What that actually does is open up the screenshot in Preview. So it is a new document that hasn't been saved yet. So when I take a screenshot it opens up in Preview and all I need to do now is a quick Command S and I can save it with any name I want, in any location I want. I can even change the format and the quality of the jpeg. Or before I Save it I can use the markup tools inside of Preview if I like. So it works a lot like a floating thumbnail but you can Save it with any name and any location. 
Now another thing you may want to do is always copy to the Clipboard instead of saving as a file, opening in Preview, or doing anything else. If you go into System Settings and then back here to Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Screenshots, you can see that you can copy a picture of the screen to the Clipboard by adding the Control key to the keyboard shortcut. So there's already a keyboard shortcut to do this. But in addition to that if you use Shift Command 5 and then Options you can set Clipboard as the default location. So now it will save to Clipboard whether you use Shift Command 3 or Control Shift Command 3. In addition to that if you have the floating thumbnail turned On and you have it set to Capture To, say, a folder you can Capture, go to the floating thumbnail and right here, at this point, you can do Command C to Copy and then you could toss this. Now you could just Paste the screenshot somewhere else into any app you want. 
Another thing I like to do is use Shift Command 5 and then switch to the Capture Selected Portion. Now I can move this around to an area that I want to capture. But instead of hitting the Capture button there I can just do Command C and that will Copy it to the Clipboard instead of whatever the default Save location is. 
Note this may seem like the same things as Shift Command 4, Capture a Picture of a Selected Area as a file or Control Shift Command 4, Copy that to the Clipboard. But when you use this, it's going to ask you for an area and immediately grab it like that. That's what you are stuck with. But using Shift Command 5 and then this Option here, Capture Selected Portion allows you to move the area around, adjust the corners and the edges. It will even remember the last selection as well as long as you have Remember Last Selection turned On. If find this is a much better way to capture exact portions of the screen than using the regular keyboard shortcut.
Another option that you can set is a Timer. You can set a Timer, say, for five or ten seconds. The advantage to doing that is sometimes you get a screenshot you can't get otherwise while you are issuing the keyboard shortcut. For instance, you can capture the menus up here. Now that I've selected that I can use the capture button here or just click on the screen to capture the screen. It is going to countdown. I could say bring up a menu like this and it will grab that menu as part of a screenshot. There are other apps that also have difficult to grab sections that you can't grab just when you hit Shift Command 3. You need to be doing something else other than that keyboard shortcut to get it to look just right. 
Now this next idea may seem a little strange to a lot of people. I know it did to me at first. But when you capture a screenshot on an iPhone or iPad where does it go? It goes into your Photos App. But on the Mac it doesn't. It is saved as a file. Now I prefer the Mac way of doing things. I wish there was a way on the iPhone and iPad to have it saved as a file instead of going to the Photos App. But there are some people that like that method and want to do it on the Mac as well. There's no setting to Save the screenshot to the Photos App. But you can choose Other Location and select a folder. Like we selected the Screenshot's Folder. Let's create yet another folder here and call this Screenshots to Photos and set it as the default location. Now we're going to run Automator. Automator has largely been replaced by Shortcuts today on Macs but it still does some things that shortcuts does not. One of those is to create a Folder Action. So we're going to create a Folder Action here and then we're going to choose the Folder Action right here and choose that folder that we just created, Screenshots to Photos. Then we're going to just put one Action in here. We're going to look in the Photos Category here and there's one called Import files into Photos. We'll drag that over here to add it. You can import without adding to an album or add to an existing top level album. We're going to Save and we'll call this Screenshots to Photos. Now this will run automatically anytime, anything goes into Screenshots to Photos. Since we have Screenshots set to go here by default this should make new screenshots go into the Photos App. So I'm going to take a screenshot of this screen right here. There's the floating thumbnail. We can take a look at it. It looks fine. Done. It goes into the folder like that and you could see the Folder Action triggers automatically. You can see the first time it runs it's actually going to ask for permission. We'll give it permission. It runs. So now if we look in the Photos App and we look at our most recent photo, sure enough, there it is. 
So I hope you found these techniques useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 19 Responses to “10 Variations On How To Take Screenshots On a Mac”

Antonello

1 year ago

Thanks you for great explanations (as always). I use Snagit to do screenshots. I especially like its ability to do a screen shot of a document (web or other) that expands over more than one page. Can Mac OS do that because that app is getting ridiculously expensive... Thanks again!

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Antonello: Not sure what you mean by "expands over more than one page."

John Robinson

1 year ago

The suggestion to use Automator is appreciated. I never use Automator and the ability to assign actions to folders I had forgotten. Have you done an Automator video, or should I go to Shortcuts hereon?

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

John: Except for Folder Actions, Shortcuts is the way to go from now on.

Jak Grimm

1 year ago

There is also the very useful option with Command-Shift-4 - hover the cursor over a window (does not have to be on top), press Space, then mouse-click. It captures just the window.

Eric

1 year ago

I find it useful to have the Screenshot app in the dock - it's easier than having to remember the less-than-intuitive keyboard shortcuts for invoking the various ways to take a screenshot.

Antonello

1 year ago

Sorry Gary, my previous was not clear. Some times it is necessary to scroll down to see an entire Webpage. So to do the screenshot of the entire web page, one needs to do multiple screenshots ending up with multiple files. Snagit can do it in one single step and hence results in one single file. Is it possible to do that with Mac OS.

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Antonello: You mean just capture the entire webpage. See https://macmost.com/screen-capture-entire-web-pages-on-your-mac.html

David Taenzer

1 year ago

I do not see Preview as an option under shift-command-5. I am running Ventura 13.1. Is there a setting I need to fix to see this?

David Taenzer

1 year ago

I figured out the problem with using Preview in the settings. I changed to capture the whole screen and the Preview option appeared. After I enabled it, it also appears when capturing a region. Quite strange.

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

David: It will not appear when you select a recording option (QuickTime Player is there instead).

Ed Mullery

1 year ago

Gary, can you drag previously-saved screenshots into the new “Screenshots to Photos” folder, and have them thus become photos? Or is this automated method just for future screenshots?

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Ed: Sure. But you can also just drag those into the Photos app. So no real advantage to that.

Louis Martin

1 year ago

On older Mac OS, SharpShooter was my screen capture tool. C-shift-4 got me a cursor that I could move anywhere and expand to what I wanted. I then got a dialog box asking me to name the image which was sent to the desktop where I always wanted it to be and in the PDF format. That was a one step action. SharpShooter is gone. Now the result is a png file after many steps, and just getting a PDF requires a few more. Any way of getting directly a PDF with a C-S-4 style set-up with Automator or ...

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Louis: You can use a Terminal command to switch the format to PDF. https://macmost.com/10-tips-and-tricks-for-taking-screenshots-on-your-mac.html

Louis Martin

1 year ago

Your suggestion to use terminal to make screen captures in PDF worked perfectly and gave me the added bonus when using Command-Shift-4 to get me an exact duplicate of what I was used to with SharpShooter. Thanks again.

Louis Martin

1 year ago

Correction almost the same as SharpShooter except for the naming of the file that comes afterwards. No Terminal command to remove this step and get a dialog box for naming the file at the same time ? Thanks. Maybe another question: is Macmost mainly oriented on software and not on hardware.

Gary Rosenzweig

1 year ago

Louis: Set it to go to Preview instead. Then take your screenshot, it opens in Preview, and then Command+S, name and save.

Louis Martin

1 year ago

I tried your suggestion of setting the options in Preview and using Command+S and it works while it opens Preview and I have to rename it afterwards. I reverted the options to desktop, saved a step with shift-command-4 (not opening an app.), renamed the desktop .pdf file using the contextual menu with a right click on my Magic Mouse 2. And this approach suits me more. Keep up the good work. Thanks

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10 Variations On How To Take Screenshots On a Mac

Comments: 19 Responses to “10 Variations On How To Take Screenshots On a Mac”

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