How To Take and Mark Up a Screenshot On a Mac

Taking a screenshot on your Mac is easy, and if you want to annotate it with arrows, shapes, text and other indicators you can do it right after taking the screenshot or later in Mail or Preview.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to take a screenshot and annotate it. 
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So using tools built into the macOS it is easy to take a screenshot and then mark it up.The keyboard shortcuts for taking a screenshot can be found in System Preferences under Keyboard, and then Shortcuts. Click on Screenshot and you'll see all of the options. Now the main option is the last one here. You can use that to set things up and then use the other ones to get to a screenshot quicker after that. But I just prefer to use Shift Command 5 in all situations. So let's have some content here on the screen and I'm going to take a screenshot. I'm going to use Command Shift 5 to bring up the tools here at the bottom that will allow me to take a screenshot. Now only the first three items here are for a screenshot. These two are for recordings. You want to check the Options first. 
So under Options you can see where the screenshot is saved to. A good place to save it is to the Desktop. That was you can easily drag and drop it into the proper folder afterwards or attach it to an email, include it in a message, or whatever you want to do with it. Now at the bottom you should check Show Floating Thumbnail. That's going to give us easy access to the Markup Tools. You can also choose Show Mouse Pointer if you want the pointer to be included. Remember the Last Selection is useful if you're always capturing a portion of the screen and will start off with the same selection as last time.
Now you have to choose from these three tools here. You can choose Capture Entire Screen, select a single window to capture, or a selected portion. Very often people capture a selected portion and capture too little of the screen. So many times I get screenshots while trying to help people and they're not showing me enough. I'm missing some context and I have to ask them for a larger screenshot.  So when in doubt just capture the entire screen. But if you know what you're doing capture the selected portion. I'll select that and you can see here I can adjust the edges and corners or grab in the middle to select an area I want. So let's say I want to select this area right here and once I'm ready I can click Capture here or just use Return and it will capture. Then I get a thumbnail at the bottom. I'm going to click that before it goes away. It will go away after a few seconds and just Save the screen capture wherever you set it to save to like the Desktop and you don't get a chance to mark it up, at least not right then. But if I click on it it goes right into a mode where I've got Markup Tools. 
So now I can annotate the screenshot. The tools here at the top are pretty self explanatory. The first one here allows you to draw. So I'm going to circle something and it will actually give me two modes. You can see the two modes right here. One is to take literally what I drew. The other is to use that as an estimation of a shape. If I choose this tool then I'm just drawing free-hand. This tool allows me to choose a shape. So I could choose a circle here, for instance, and it puts a circle there. I can then drag it, move it around, resize it very easily. I could also select a line or an arrow which is very useful. Whenever you select one of these tools you could go to these settings here to change some things about it. Like, for instance, the line shape. I can make it thicker. I can change arrows to have the arrow on the other side or both sides. I can choose here to change the line color which with an arrow that's all you've got. So I can make it red for instance. But if this was something like a circle or a square I could change the color of the line there but here is where I would set the fill color.
Now any shape allows you to type in it. So I can double click inside here and type something. Once I have text I could select it, Command A, and I could change the font size, the color, and other properties. This is particularly useful if you're using something like this bubble right here. You can write some text in here and then you can drag this green dot here and have it point to something. If you want to highlight something you also have two other tools here. One is this one which will gray out everything except a box there. It's a little tricky to use because if you want to drag it you actually drag the gray area like that. But you can use this to highlight something while not completely removing the things outside. You could also choose this tool which is a magnifier so it gives you a little circle and you can click and drag the blue dot to make the circle larger and click and drag the green dot to change the magnification. So you can just magnify it a little bit. If you want you can also just click here to add a text all by itself. Restyle that. Change it's color. Move it to wherever you want. You can even add a background color to this. So if the text doesn't standout enough you can make it just a plain color behind it. 
 
If you want you can also crop the screenshot here. Which is even more of a reason to use the full screen screenshot because you can then crop it after the fact removing a little bit from it like that. While you're working with any of this you can click and select something to move it around or change it or just use the delete key to get rid of it. If you want to add multiple things like multiple arrows here you can always Copy and Paste and get another one or you can hold the option key down and drag to drag out a duplicate from the original. If you want to start over again you can click Revert to get rid of everything. Clicking Done will  just put this screenshot with the marking that you've added in the place where you had it set before, so like to your Desktop or directly to Mail or Messages or something like that. You can also click the Trashcan here to just delete the screenshot and then you can start again. Or if you want you can bypass wherever it was supposed to Save and click here and Share it somewhere else. So you may have originally had it set to go to Desktop but now I can click here and have it go to an email message or to Notes. So I'll click Done and now you can see it appears here and it's just a regular image here. If i were to double click it it would open up in Preview. But you can see I can't change these markings here. They are permanently a part of this. I would definitely recommend renaming the screenshot to make it something that you can easily search for later or something that makes sense to whomever it is you're sending it to. 
So here are a few more tips. What if you want to take a screenshot that's seems kind of impossible? Like for instance say I wanted to show this menu here and if I hold the Option key down you can see how things change. So what if I wanted to Capture that. Well, if I were to use the Option Key here and do Shift Command 5 I can't initiate the screenshot because the Option Key is held down. If I release the Option Key you could see I don't now have the things that appear when I'm holding the Option Key. So what you would do in a situation like that is you would do Shift Command 5, go to Options and set a Timer. Now I can use Shift Command 5. I can do Capture and it's going to countdown. So now I can bring up this Menu, hold the Option Key down, and when the screenshot is taken you could see it looks like I want it to look. 
Let me take this screenshot and say I want to go directly to a Mail message. So I'll Capture and it's going to open up Mail. Now in this case it didn't give me the chance to annotate it. But I can still annotate it right here in Mail. If I move my pointer over it you could see I can click here and then click Markup and then I get the same Markup Tools here. So I can still mark it up before sending it. 
Another thing I want to show you is Image Size. So all too often people have set Small as their image size, which makes sense when sending photos. You want to send a cute little photo and you don't want to send a huge file. That's fine. But when you set it to Small it's going to compress this and the person receiving it may not actually be able to make out what's going on because it's too small. So before sending a screenshot always check image size here. Make sure it's set large enough, in a lot of cases Actual Size is what you want. 
If you set the Options to go to Preview it will take the screenshot and open it up in Preview. So I capture here and you could see it opens up in Preview. In Preview you've got the same Markup Tools here. The great thing is that it is now just an untitled document. So instead of ending up with this weird file name saved to my Desktop I now can mark it up and now when I go to Save I can choose where I want it to save. I can choose a File name. I could also choose a format here and change the quality of it. So, for instance, if I want to save a nice compressed screenshot I can do so here as JPEG and bring the compression down to make a nice small file size. 
So if you do this a lot you may want to setup your workflow to always go directly to Preview. In that way you get to name, place, and compress your screenshots every time. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 15 Responses to “How To Take and Mark Up a Screenshot On a Mac”

Bob Fox

3 years ago

Excellent presentation.

What about highlighting certain lines or areas of the screenshot? We were not able to do this. My brother uses the windows snipping program but wants to do something like that on a iMac

Gary Rosenzweig

Bob: Use the tools: circles, rectangles, arrows, text, etc, too highlight what you want. A screenshot is an image, so you can't select and highlight text in it (those are just pixels like everything else).

Eduardo Rodriguez Avila

Hello! I recently found out about this screenshot utility (not sure since when it exists in macOS). Quite useful. I already knew the keyboard shortcuts to capture the whole screen or just a part of it from several years ago, but this utility gives you a lot of help. I think it is much, much better than the equivalent snipping tool in Windows. Your video gives me a lot of understanding on this. Thanks a lot!

sury

Great Gary. Thank you very much.
I didn't know so much was possible with just screen shot.

John

I have screen capture set to go to preview, but more than half the time, preview opens as it should, but I get a file open dialog box, as if I’m opening an existing document. sometimes it works correctly, no file open dialog box, just the screen capture, in preview just like it’s supposed to. any ideas on the cause of this behavior? have you ever seen this happen?

John: Perhaps you already had Preview running, with the File Open dialog showing, but the whole app hidden or behind other windows.

Razvan Mihai

Gary & Bob: You can continue annotating a screenshot saved to the Note app on iPhone or iPad. You can there use the ruler and color of your liking to highlight what you want. Syncing over iCloud may sometimes result in some delays, though. Not sure how to speed up the sync process. Any thoughts?

Rick Grossman

Good information here I didn't know I could add text to any shape.
1 Is there a way for the Markup Toolbar to be open by default when I open Preview?
2 Can Preview be used to combine two images?
3 I often use Markup to hide confidential information before sending the screen shot as a jpg. Can a recipient uncover what I've covered?

Rick: No, you'll need to click the button to open the tool. Preview can be used to combine images, but that depends on your definition -- what are you actually trying to do? You can copy part of one image and paste it into another. If you cover a part of an image with a box and save it out, the original pixels are gone, no way to see them.

Bert Mullemeister

Hi Gary, thanks for this video. I was able to change my locked screen on my iPhone to include a message If Found please ring xxxx (my wife)
This may be helpful to other users

Jeanne Bragg

It was very helpful to show how to save to "Preview.."
Eliminates a step.
I do find it difficult to locate prior screenshots when you take more than one.
Besides naming them, any hints?

Jeanne: Just a matter of naming them and putting them in a logical place in your file organization. Whatever works for you.

Peter Knight

Gary,
Thanks for a great tutorial.
You seem to a few more annotation tools available to you. For instance, I do not appear to have the free form drawing tool. Is this an OS version issue? I am running Catalina on my late 2013 iMac.

Peter: Some may be missing because you are using an old version of macOS. Also keep in mind that the markup tools are different depending on whether you are making up an image or a PDF.

George Chung

OMG, the markup functionality is so awesome. Before I learned this I was pasting the screenshot into PowerPoint to markup.

Comments Closed.

How To Take and Mark Up a Screenshot On a Mac

Comments: 15 Responses to “How To Take and Mark Up a Screenshot On a Mac”

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