How To Take, Mark Up and Share Screenshots On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to take a screenshot, mark it up, and share it with someone.

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So whether you want to share your screen with somebody to show them what you're working on or maybe ask for tech help from somebody knowing how to take a screenshot and then mark it up and send it to somebody is an important computer skill that everybody should have. 

So to take a screenshot on a Mac there are a lot of different keyboard shortcuts you can use. But unless you take screenshots all day long as part of your work the one you want to use is Shift Command 5. This brings up this Control here that allows you to do all the different things you can do with screenshots. The first three items here lets you decide what you're capturing. You can capture the entire screen, capture a selected window, or capture a selected portion. In most cases you want to use Capture Entire Screen. A big mistake people make is using capture selected portion and narrow everything down to what they think they needs to be shared with the other person. But in reality the other person needs to see more of what's going on than just that small area. 

So using Capture Entire Screen you should  also go to Options here and set several options. You can set where you want the screenshot to be saved to. You can create your own location by choosing Other Location and create a folder that all your screen-shots go into. Or you can select Desktop, Documents, or you can have it open directly in the Preview App or go directly to Messages or Mail. Let's stick with just one of these locations. I'll use Documents for now. Then I'm going to make sure I have turned on Show Floating Thumbnail. This way it's going to give us the option to markup the screenshot and decide what to do with it even if what we decide to do with it is actually delete it, which is common because when you take a screenshot you realize you didn't get what you wanted and you want to try again. You don't want to litter your hard drive with all these screenshots when you do that.

So with those options selected you can use your pointer, and you can see how it is a camera now, and click on the screen to capture it. You can also use the Capture button here. If you have more than one screen connected to your Mac the Capture button is going to capture all of them. But clicking on a screen is just going to capture that one screen. When I do that I get the floating thumbnail here at the bottom right. I want to click on that fairly quickly before it goes away. After a few seconds it goes away and the file is saved to whatever the location was that you set it for. In my case the Documents folder. But I don't want it to go to the Documents folder yet, at least. I want it to go in here which is a window that allows me to markup the screenshot. Now this is another mistake people make. They don't markup their screenshot. Instead they will include a screenshot and try to describe in text what the person that they sent it to should be looking at. 

But what is much better to do is actually to mark it up. Show right here what you're supposed to do and you can use a variety of tools for that. You have two different drawing tools. This first one here allows you to draw a shape. It will estimate the shape so you can quickly draw circles and ovals or you can click here to actually draw exactly what you outlined. You can use this pen tool here to draw other things. To draw arrows. Do all sorts of things like that. You can use the Shapes to draw specific things like lines, arrows that you can move around and point at things. You can draw shapes. You can draw little speech bubbles. All of the shapes that can be filled in allow you to type text in the middle like that. You could also have text by itself by clicking here and then you can have a piece of text. Anytime you have text in a shape or by itself you can use this tool here to set the color, the font, the size. Also with Shapes you can set the line type. You can set the color. If it's a shape that we filled you could fill it with a color right here. So for instance I could mark it up like this. Let me add a shape here. I'm going to add a fill of white. I'm going to put a number in it showing this is the first step. So I can annotate this in a lot of different ways. I going to here point to some things to do, some steps maybe and then I'm going to Option Drag and Option Drag again and create another set of steps. You can see now I'm describing right there on the screenshot, without the need for any explanation, exactly what it is I'm talking about.

So if you're having a problem with something you could circle it. You could put a comment there. You could include all sorts of different things right there on the screenshot. 

Now it's time to do something with it.  Let's say that we decide that this screenshot isn't what we wanted. We could always use the Trash button here to delete and it never saves it as a file. We could also click Done here. Done will save it to its location. So in this case the Documents folder. Or we could use Share here and create an email, a message, or share it another way like using AirDrop or add it to our Notes or Photos or Reminders. So you can skip actually saving it as a file in many different ways. In this case let's save it as a file by clicking Done. So now here in my Documents folder I've got that screenshot. If I use QuickLook I can see the annotations in there. Now I'm composing a message and I want to add that screenshot into the message. So I can just Drag and Drop the file in here. If I had chosen to actually go right to Mail then it would start just like this and you could see the screenshot in here. 

Now this is another mistake people make. If you look over here you'll see image size and you'll see Small, Medium, and Large and Actual Size. The big mistake people make is using Small. Sometimes they have used small in the past and now that's the default for the next message. If you look at this here it looks like maybe this is a thumbnail. But it's not. It's the actual image. So you can see you can barely read the text or what's on buttons and things like that. I get lots of screenshots where somebody has selected small without thinking about it and now I can't tell what their screenshot is. So make sure you select something larger like medium or large in most cases, and send that. 

Now, of course, this is going to create a larger attachment. So you may want to consider a better way to actually send this. That's to not send it at all. Send an email but with a link to where that image is available online. One way to do that is to simply Share it with iCloud. So my Documents and Desktop folders are part of iCloud Drive. So any file I select here can easily be shared. I can Control Click it to bring up Context Menu or I could just go to File, Share and do Share file. Then what I want to do here is set it to anybody with a link and then View Only. Then I could leave Mail selected there and that will create a new Mail message or I can Copy Link and paste it anywhere I want. So I'll use Copy Link like that. Now notice this is shared right here. If I switch to Mail I can paste this link in. This is what the link looks like. 

Let's take a look in a private browsing window here in Safari and see what somebody else would see if they clicked on that link. They would see this. There's the file. They could add it to their iCloud Drive or download a copy. If they download a copy they will be able to view the image. So they don't have to download it if they don't want to and they don't have to have their email server clogged up with a large attachment. They can just get it separate from that. 

But another way to go is to use a free service online to just upload the image. So here are a couple of them. One is imgur and you can just go to imgur.com. You don't have to create an account. You can create a new post. You can drag an image there. You can see it appears there. This link, this little link here, can be copied and pasted into an email and anybody with that link could see the screenshot. Another popular one is postimages.org and you could do the same thing here even setting an expiration where after seven days it will just be deleted. You can choose the image, get a link like this, and then somebody else going to that link would see the image right there, is able to download it. You don't need an account for that and they don't need an account for that. It's great to be able to see the image there on the web and get an idea what you're talking about without ever having to download the file. 

So there's how to do it. You take the screenshot, you mark it up, and then you share it using email or better yet by posting it somewhere online and sharing the link in an email. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.