10 Tips and Tricks For Taking Screenshots On Your Mac

Here are some tips if you are ready to move beyond taking simple screenshots. You can have screenshots go directly into apps or save to a location of your choice, change the image type to get smaller files, and streamline the process with hidden keyboard shortcuts.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten tips for taking Screen Shots on your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 900 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
First let's start by reviewing the keyboard shortcuts you use to take screenshots. You go into System Preferences and Keyboard, then go to Shortcuts and then Screenshots. You'll see all of the options here. Now the first four options have been around for a long time and they allow you to use a quick keyboard shortcut to take specific type of screenshot. For instance Shift Command 3 will take a shot of the entire screen and store it as a file. But you can use Shift Command 5 to do any of these four things plus a whole bunch of more options. So it's a lot easier just to remember Shift Command 5 and it's what I use most of the time. Unless you're taking a certain type of screenshot all the time it's just easier to do Shift Command 5 than of all the options available. 
So when you use Shift Command 5 you get an interface at the bottom of the screen that looks like this. The first three options here are screenshot options. These are recording options. So you've got Capture Entire Screen, Capture Selected Window, and Capture Selected Area. Now you can choose anyone of these and it will remember it for next time. So let's stick right now with Capture Entire Screen. My first tip is going to be some keyboard shortcuts here for the next step. If you want to exit this all you need to do is press the Escape key and it closes it. If you want to take the screenshot then you can go over here and click Capture. You could also click on the screen that you want. I've got multiple screens on my Mac so I can actually move this camera cursor to whatever screen I want and it will take a screenshot of just that screen. If I use this Capture button here it's actually going to give me all three screens as three separate files. But I could just use Return to bypass having to use the Capture key. So a quick Shift Command 5 and then a Return will take the screenshot. 
Now of course you noticed that it first appeared as a Thumbnail at the bottom right hand corner. I had to wait quite a long time for it to appear here on my desktop as a file. A lot of people complain about this and it's easy to skip. It's just a setting. So let's use Shift Command 5 to get back into this interface and Click Options. It's Show Floating Thumbnail. If you turn that Off now when I hit Return it immediately saves the file. So you have complete control over how it works. 
Now there are also other options here. Whether or not you have Show Floating Thumbnail on or off, I'll turn it back on, if you set it to some of these special options it won't appear as a thumbnail. It will go directly to a specific app, like Mail or Messages. Let's set it to Mail. Now when I hit Return to capture the screen it immediately opens up a new email message and you can see the screenshot is there as an attachment. So if sending screenshots in email messages is something you need to do quite often then you may want to set it to this as the default. Note that when you change either the floating thumbnail option or where the screenshot goes it effects the other keyboard shortcuts as well. So if I used Shift Command 3 it will actually do the same thing. Here it's putting it in an email message which is what I had it set to. So if you want to use Shift Command 3, but you don't want to have the floating thumbnail, simply set it to Save To wherever you want it to save and then turn off Show Floating Thumbnail. Now when you Shift Command 3 it immediately saves the document, in this case all three of my screens right here on the desktop. 
Now let's take a look at some of these other screenshot options. In Capture Selected Area or a portion you select that you get this area here that you can move around, you can adjust the size and the corners to capture exactly what you want. Now sometimes you may want to just Capture, you can use Return to do that. Other times you may want to adjust to Go To Clipboard. But there's a trick that you can use. You can actually use Command C right here. So I have it set to Capture to a File. But instead of hitting return or pressing the Capture button, if I just do Command C it copies to the Clipboard. So now if I take a look at what's in the Clipboard you can see I've got that screenshot. It's ready to be easily pasted into any other app that will accept an image. You can do the same thing with a full screenshot. So if I switch to Capture Entire Screen I can do Command C and it captures the entire screen to the Clipboard for me to paste in anywhere else. That works with the Capture Selected Window options as well. 
Now speaking of Cropping if you'd rather crop after you do a capture you could easily do that by using the option Preview here. That will send the screenshot directly to the Preview app. So in this case let's capture the entire screen and you could see it's going to open up Preview and open up the capture inside of Preview. Now that I'm in here I could easily select any area I want and then use Crop or Command K to quickly crop to that area. Now it's in Preview here I can use Command S or File, Save and save it wherever I want. You could also select and then Command C to copy an area. So now I can paste it into an email or message or another app. 
Now another way to do this is to actually use that floating thumbnail. This is what makes it useful. So if I have the floating thumbnail turned on and I capture the screen if I click on the thumbnail there now I can go in here and use this Cropping tool and crop it. It works a little different than it does in Preview. It looks a lot more like it does in Photos. Crop the area. Hit Done and it will  Save just the cropped portion. So there are a few ways to crop a screenshot after you take it. Note that the floating thumbnail does have a lot of useful tools in here. Not only can you Crop but you could do just about anything you do in Preview including annotate it with drawings, shapes, text, you could even sign things if it's a document. Then you could send it to various different places right from here without actually having to save the file. If it's something you don't want, the screenshot isn't of use to you after looking at it, you could click the Trash button here and it goes away. There's never a file for you to have to delete. 
So now let's take a look at capturing a window. When you have this selected and then you click on a window it will capture the window and put it in a file. Now if we look at that with QuickLook we can see there's a lot of extra space around it. That's including a shadow behind the window. If you don't want that shadow you can turn that off but you have to do it in Terminal. So in Terminal we're going to use this Command which is: defaults write, which will change settings, and the setting we want to change are com.apple.screencapture, the setting itself is disable-shadow. We're going to set it to true. Disable those shadows. Then we want to use: killall SystemUIServer that restarts the system user interface server which is what controls screenshots and displaying windows and things on the screen. So we'll use that. Now when we go to do the same thing we'll capture the window again and we're going to get a screenshot. You could see here that it's got less of an area around it because it's not capturing the shadow.
To turn if Off all we need to do is use false instead of true. I can use a semicolon here to separate the second command so I can do this all on one line. One simple paste of this command here and then return and it's set, disable shadow false.
Now here's another preference you can change using the Terminal. Instead of disable dash shadow we're simply going to change Type. Here you can put three characters that represent the type of image that gets saved. By default it's a png which is lossless, every pixel is perfect in the screenshot. But those files can be a little large. If you want to compress it a little bit you can instead use jpg for jpeg and now it will save screenshots as a jpeg image. So when I capture now I'll get a jpeg image here. I had previously captured the exact same thing using a png. If I look at information for the png I could see that's it 5.2 MB and for the jpeg is only 442K. So considerably smaller. It's still going to do a pretty high resolution jpeg but it will be somewhat compressed so it won't look as crisp and clean as the png. 
Now other values you can use here are gif if you want a gif file and pdf if you want a pdf. That's actually going to create a jpeg and put it into a pdf document. But it could be useful if you need to take a screenshot and send it to somebody as a pdf. That's how they want it for some reason. Then you could save your screenshots directly to a pdf like this. To set it back to the default just change this to png and now it will return to using png's as the image type.
So a few more tips here. One is if you want the location for your screenshots to be somewhere beside the desktop and Documents you can choose Other Location. So, for instance, let's go into the Finder here and let's say my Documents folder I want to create a New Folder and I'll call it Screenshots. Then I could go in here and choose Other Location. In Documents. I can select the Screenshots folder and choose it now it will save all of my screenshots here until I change it again. This is much better than cluttering up your Desktop all the time. It's pretty easy to change. So if you're working on a project where you want to save all the screenshots for today in a certain folder you can set it to that and then tomorrow you can change it to another location to save your screenshots. It's not permanent. You can change it all the time if you want. 
Also note that if you take a screenshot and you have the floating thumbnail option turned on when you capture you can actually take this thumbnail and drag it to a folder right away and it will place it in there. Now a question I sometimes get is what if you want to capture something, like say a menu here. If you bring up a menu and want to include that in your screenshot as soon as I hit Shift Command 5 and then I go over here to Capture it's going to remove this menu. But you can use the shortcut. Return. You could see it actually captures the menu. Another way to do it that can capture even trickier things is to use the Timer. So if I go here to Options and set a 5 second timer and then Capture it's going to countdown. That gives me an opportunity to select some things in the menus and it will capture exactly what happens when the 5 seconds or 10 seconds elapses. 
I've got one last tip for you. You can actually capture the screen of the Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro. You can't use Shift Command 5 for that. It doesn't appear as an option. But if you're using a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar and you go to Keyboard Shortcuts in System Preferences you see there are two options that Macs without Touch Bars don't get. That's to capture the Touch Bar either to a file or to the Clipboard. This will obey various settings like exactly where you want the screenshot saved and all of that. But you have to use Shift Command 6 or Control Shift Command 6 in order to capture the Touch Bar.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Here are some of the Terminal commands mentioned:
Get rid of the shadow:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow false; killall SystemUIServer

Change to true to re-enable the shadow.

Change type of file:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG; killall SystemUIServer

You can use PNG, GIF or PDF as well.

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Tips and Tricks For Taking Screenshots On Your Mac”

Mick

4 years ago

Brilliant information thanks Gary.

Thomas

Hi, Gary. The above mentioned terminal command didn't work on my Mac. After googling, I found that 'defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true' does the trick. Thanks for the tip.

Tom Craig

Hi Gary,

I've been using screenshots for some time now, but after watching your video, I realized how many options I was not aware of! Thanks - I will save lots of time for future work.

Mark Holmes

3 years ago

Gary,
I was trying to do a screenshot of a complete page on Safari. Normally you get the entire screen, but I want the part you can't see below the bottom of the page and need to scroll to view. I saw this tip which works fine but does require a few steps -https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/04/08/capture-full-page-screenshots-safari-firefox-chrome-mac/. Just wondered if there was a quicker, simpler method?

Gary,
When I select the screenshot app on my m1iMac running Monterey and click on Message as my destination, nothing happens. I would expect an iMessage window to pop up, but that doesn't happen. All the other destinations seem to work fine, but Messages just doesn't appear. Thoughts on that? I'm running OS 12.1.

Gary Rosenzweig

Mark: As for Messages, a bug I guess? As for web page screenshots on a Mac, just use Firefox when you need that. https://macmost.com/screen-capture-entire-web-pages-on-your-mac.html

Comments Closed.

10 Tips and Tricks For Taking Screenshots On Your Mac

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Tips and Tricks For Taking Screenshots On Your Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information