How to I change Screen Capture from the default PNG to JPG on my Mac mini M1 running macOS 12.2.1?
I followed the instructions others gave me to open Terminal.app and type in: defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg [plus one space]. Then I closed Terminal and restarted the computer. When I re-opened Terminal, the sentence was gone, and Screen Capture still made PNG files. I tried again, shutting down the computer this time, with the same non-result.
Thank you!
I make a lot of screen captures, sometimes saving them as images and often inserting them in Pages documents to illustrate my text. PNG images use up more bytes than JPG images, making my files larger and taking up more space to save. JPG images are lower quality, and not lossless, however that isn’t important to me when I’m making screen captures.
Device: Mac Running Monterey
App: Something Else
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L. Carpenter
On one line of the Terminal, type this and then press Return:
Then type this and press Return:
You could also combine them on one like:
That should do it. Not sure what you mean by "plus one space" but there shouldn't need to be a space after "jpg" or anything like that.
Another technique is to use Command+Shift+5 to bring up all of the screen capture options. Then click Options and select Preview under Save To. Now when you take a screenshot, it will not save, but instead open in Preview. You can then File, Save in preview and select JPEG. You can even choose the quality level at that point. You can also easily crop the image in Preview. Since your goal is to save some space, it could be useful to crop at this point and only keep what you want.
Using the Save To -> Preview option also allows entering a specific Name and Location to save the image. Thank you, Gary