Quickly Markup and Send Mac Screenshots

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can quickly take Markup and then Save or Send a screenshot on your Mac. 

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Now a lot of people ask online how you can get some sort of app that can allow you to quickly take a screenshot, mark it up, and then do something with it. But there is built-in Screenshot functionality on the Mac. However if you don't take the time to learn how to use it it can seem like there are a lot of steps involved. But if you do want to just quickly mark something up and then do something with it you can. Let me show you a few different methods for doing that all that is built into macOS. 

So unless you've changed the keyboard shortcut in System Settings the main way to take a screenshot is to Shift Command and then 5. The brings up the controls you see here at the bottom. This allows you to take screenshots and make screen recordings. You want to choose one of the three options here on the left. Either take a Screenshot of the entire screen; or a selected window; or capture a portion of the screen. Then you want to look under Options and see where it Saves To and some other things here. Now the problem a lot of people have is if you're saving screenshots to say the Desktop or some other folder then you create the screenshot, you mark it up, and then you have to go and find the file. But you don't have to! You don't even have to Save it anywhere. Leave it as one of these folders here. I'm going to leave it as the Desktop. But I'm not actually going to Save any screenshots of the Desktop. Then down under Options make sure Show Floating Thumbnail is turned On. You could also have Remember Last Selection which works with the selected area function there. Also show Mouse Pointer if you actually want to see the pointer in the Screenshot. I'll leave both of those Off. 

Now with those Options set like that, and it is set to capture a selected portion, I'm going to select an area and capture that part of the screen. I can click Capture or I can just press Return and it will take the screenshot. I get this floating thumbnail here on the bottom right. If I click that before it goes away, you only have a few seconds, it brings up the Screenshot Utility where you can Markup the screenshot. So now all you need to do is click this Markup button here. If you notice the screenshot isn't quite right you can always click the Trashcan and start over again. I'm going to click the Markup Tool here and now I can mark this up. 

So before I go to the next step of actually using this screenshot let me show you some of my favorite markup techniques. One thing you can do is simply draw an arrow. So click here under Shapes, select Arrow, and it creates this arrow here. You can move both ends of it and have it point to something. So you can have it point to that, for instance. You can go here and change the size of the line. You can go here and change the color of the line. You can even have a shadow or no shadow or even where the arrowheads are. Once you've set this up the next arrow will look just like this. So, if you've got a favorite style you only need to change that once. Then just draw arrows and they will always be in that style. Another thing you can do to accompany that is you can add Text. Like here and it adds a Textbox. You can type whatever you want. You can then click here and then change the font size, let's go down to something more reasonable like 40. You can change the color like that and other things about it like the font. Then you can click away from it and then click and drag it and put it somewhere. Now that same style, that will be used the next time you create text as well. 

You can also use other shapes. For instance a circle shape is really good. It gives you a little oval there and you can use it to cover something. Notice I've got the border color there set to this and there's a Fill Color Set. I can remove it so it's just transparent. Now I can circle something and I can grab the end here. If you want to create a perfect circle hold the Shift Key down and now you create a perfect circle there. This allows you to circle something really quickly if there is one thing you want to point out. If you  want to combine those things you've got this really cool shape here that's simply a Talk Bubble there. You create that and now you've got this shape here. If you double-click in it you can type in it. So you can type a word or maybe you want to actually put a number. Like I'll just do the number 1 here. You can double-click to select everything there and change the font, the font color, you can change the color here of the border, and all of that. Then you can move the dots here to resize it. You can also use these green dots here and move it around so you can have this point to something. So you can have a little pointer there with a number in it. 

One of my favorite things to do is take the second green dot where you expand the size of this pointer and bring it to its minimum. So it is basically a circle with a line. Grab this green dot and have it point anywhere you want really easily. 

Here's a tip that works a lot in different situations. and it's really useful here. You can duplicate this. Of course you can select it, move it around, and do Copy, Command C and Command V to Paste, to have another one. But what is easier is just Option Drag. You get a second one. Now I can easily create another one of these. It's the same size and have it point to something else and quickly fill this up with little numbered pointers. 

Here's another tip. This first drawing tool here allows you to sketch. If you select that you can see it is highlighted there with a Blue color. You can draw something and it will try to default to an exact shape. So, for instance, if I want to circle this word here I can circle it and see how imperfect my circle is. But when I release it becomes a perfect circle. Notice here I get the ability to actually switch back to my imperfect circle. So you can circle a whole bunch of things, like this, and create these perfect circles and not have to worry about how messy your drawing is. It even works with other shapes. So you can do, say, something that is roughly square or rectangular, like that. You can do an arrow like this. You can even create one of those talk bubbles. The way to do that is circle and then go to the middle and then draw the line out. You can see it goes to one of the talk bubbles. The actual pointer is at minimum right there. So you can immediately then have it point to something else if you want. This is really handy for creating a bunch of quick markups. You can create lines like that, that are perfect. You can create stars if you want. You can even create curves, like this. I'll create a curved arrow. See how well that worked. Then I can adjust it afterwards. 

So now let's get onto Sharing this. You can, of course, use the Share Button here at the top. You can share this in a variety of different ways. For instance, you can compose a new email message. Let's click that. It's going to launch Mail and you can see how it includes the image here. Remember in Mail you get to choose the image size here. So I'm going to choose Large so it is nice and clear. You've got other options here like Messages. You can send it to your Notes, for instance. You can Air Drop it to another device if you want. If you want to save it as a file use Preview. This will open it up in Preview and then you can use Command S and save it from there. Or you can simply click Done here and that will actually save it to that default location. So in this case the Desktop or maybe you set it to another folder. 

But my favorite way to handle this is using Copy and Paste. Now if you've got one of these still selected you want to make sure you deselect everything. So click somewhere else so you don't have any particular item selected. Then just do Command C. Command C will copy everything including these annotations here. Now I can go to another app. I'll just move this window app away. Say I'm in Pages here, but I could be composing an email or something else. I can Command V to Paste. You can see how it pastes in the image including all your annotations. When you do that one of the things you want to do when you're finished is use the little Trash button here and this will get rid of this without saving it as a file. As a matter of fact you can do Command C and if you feel confident enough you can just hit the Trash button there, it goes away, and now you can paste it somewhere else. 

So to show you how quick this can be let's say instead of using Shift Command 5 I'm just going to use Shift Command 3, which takes a screenshot without giving you that intermediate interface. It goes there as a thumbnail. I click the thumbnail. It brings up the entire thing. I go to the Annotation tools and here I can mark it up. I'm going to go and just draw some circles and point to things and then put some numbers in or other things like that. Once I've got my annotations I make sure I don't have anything selected. I do Command C to Copy and I trash this. I go into another app and Command V to Paste. If you use Shift Command 4 then by default you're not selecting an area. so I can do Shift Command 4, select an area, click on the floating thumbnail and mark it up and then use Sharing or Copy and Paste to put it somewhere else. 

Now I want to show you a second method that could be faster depending upon what you're trying to do. If you do Shift Command 5 and you change the Options to go to Preview. So it is not saving it to a folder called Preview. This is actually the app, Preview. Use that. Now it's not going to go to the floating thumbnail. It will go right to the Preview App and open up a new Preview document with the screenshot in it. So I'm going to grab this section here. Return. You can see it opens up Preview. I'm in the Preview App here. I've got the screenshot there already but it is not saved. You can see it's Untitled right here. I can get to the Markup Tools just like I can using the screenshot tool. One of the advantages to Preview though is you actually have keyboard shortcuts for that. So I go to View and right there is Show Markup Toolbar, Shift Command A. So I can get to this with Shift Command A and now you can see all the tools there. There are also some keyboard shortcuts to directly access some of these. You go to Tools, under Annotate you can see things, for instance, for creating an oval or creating some text. You even got a speech bubble here. It doesn't have a keyboard shortcut but you could always assign one System Settings. 

So now I can go and create things just like I did before. I can sketch for instance a circle with a line. I could then go and change its color. I can add some text to it like that. Change the text color. I can continue to mark things up. I can Option Drag, for instance, to create a duplicate and mark things up as before. So the keyboard shortcuts make things a little faster, but what also makes things faster is now you can just save this. Just a quick Command S and it will bring up Save. You can choose the format, set the location, and do all the other things like access your Favorites, Create New Folders, all of that. But you could also just Copy and Paste. A quick Command C here, for instance, and then you can Paste into another app like Mail. 

You also have some additional tools here. Like for instance you can adjust the color with this. You can adjust the size with this tool here before you save it. You can select a portion to copy. So let's say you've marked this up and you realize that you want to Crop it. But you don't want to be bothered with cropping. What you can do here is you can select and then go to Tools, Crop. But, you could also select using this tool here and then just Command C and it will copy just the section here that you've selected. So I could Copy this portion here and Paste it into something. Then select another area and Copy that portion and then Paste it something. 

One of the problems with annotating screenshots is once you Save it as an image the annotations are actually imprinted on the image. Those pixels from the bubbles or arrows or circles actually replaced the pixels that were there underneath it before. If you want to actually save it with layers so that you can edit the annotations later on, you need to Save it as a PDF, which you can do using Preview. So I'm going to capture an area here and under Options I've got it set to go to Preview. So now when I capture I get this unsaved Preview document. I'm going to go to File and Save, Command S, and make sure I choose the format PDF. I'll give it a name and Save it. Now I've got this test.pdf document. So now if I annotate then I can change the annotations later on. So I'll just create a simply arrow here, for instance, to point to something as an example and I will Save this and I will Close it. Now open it up again and notice that I can select this arrow and move it around only because I saved it as a PDF, first. It's important that you do this first, before you add your first annotation. 

If you find that you use this almost all the time then you can go into terminal and use the defaults command to write to this set of preferences. The type PDF. That will make your screenshots default to PDF. Use this whole command here and now you can go right to Preview where it is already a PDF. Save it, mark it up, and you'll be able to go back in and Edit those markups later on. 

So if you often need to take Markup Screenshots hopefully I've shown you how the built-in macOS Tools for doing that are powerful and quick and easy to use.