Taking Screenshots In macOS Mojave

Mojave offers a new comprehensive method of taking screenshots and doing screen recordings. Instead of using a variety of keyboard shortcuts and methods, there is now on keyboard shortcut that will bring up a control strip with all of the options. You can capture the screen, an area, or a window. You can save to a file, clipboard or go directly to an app. You can even set up timed captures and record video.

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Video Transcript: So if you ever have the need to take screenshots on your Mac then macOS Mojave has the first major update to that functionality in a long time. Let's take a look. Let's start by going to System Preferences and in Keyboard Shortcuts we can see the Screenshots shortcuts and the first four are very familiar because they are exactly the same. Right. You can use Shift Command 3 to save a picture of the whole screen as a file. You've got shortcuts for saving to the Clipboard, saving a selected area to a file, or a selected area to the Clipboard.
But now we have a fifth command. It basically replaces the first four. You can still use them if you want. But the fifth one, Screenshot and Recording Options, is simply Shift Command 5. This is what happens when you use it. Shift Command 5 and it brings up this control strip here at the bottom and you have lots of options.
So you've got the option to capture the entire screen. You've got the option to capture a selected window. You've got the option to capture a selected portion of the screen. All the options we had before. But now it's really clear to what you're using. You don't have to remember all the keyboard shortcuts. Just Shift Command 5 is the only one you need to remember and you have these options here. In addition you can also do screen recording from here. Now you could've done that before with QuickTime Player and it's still available at QuickTime Player. But you can use it right here. You can record the entire screen that's going to give you a video recording. Or you can record a selected portion or the screen. 
Now we've got even more options here. Just click on Options and there's a bunch of things. You can set where this screenshot is going to be saved to.  So you can save it to the Desktop. You can select other things here. You can select Other Location and choose anywhere you want to save it. You could set a timer for 5 or 10 seconds. This is really useful if you want to capture some sort of action and you can't kind of do the screenshot and then do the action at the same time. Like if you need to hold down a key to see something or if you need to bring up a menu. Then you can say 5 second delay, start the screenshot, get everything like you want and then it captures it.
Then you've got other options. Like whether or not to Show the Floating Thumbnail when it's done. I'll show you that in a second. Remember Last Selection for selecting part of the screen. Whether or not to Show Mouse Pointer. Then you have the big Capture button. So once you've selected these options you can go with what you want.
So let's go and say Capture the entire screen. Click that and I'll hit Capture. Now look at the bottom right here. There's that floating thumbnail that I was talking about. If you click it it will open it up and give you all the markup tools. So you've got the ability to draw on it, to add text to it, all sorts of things and crop it as well using the crop tool here. You can view it to see whether or not it's what you want. Now you have commands here on the top right. You can throw this away if you didn't get the screenshot you wanted. You can trash it. You can simply hit Done and that will continue to save the file to where you want it to. You can hit the Share button. The Share button allows you to actually share this out without ever saving it as a file. So if you want to send it as an email you can do that and not have this file leftover on your desktop or in some folder somewhere. So you have all the ability to do this. It's great! You can quickly mark something up. So let's just hit Done here and you can see it's actually going to save here.
I have actually have three screens on my Mac so that's why you get three screenshots like that. So let's try it again. I'll do Shift Command 5 but this time I'm going to bring up a Finder window. Shift Command 5 and I'm going to say I want to select a window. Now I can click on the window to select it and there it appears there at the bottom. If I wait long enough it just saves it as a file. So I don't have to click here to do anything. But once I get it now I can go and do like a markup. Put a circle around something. I can, you know, create an arrow and move it somewhere. Change it's color. Then I could go out and Share it. I can crop it if I need to. So further crop it to something else. Or just hit Done and now it saves it out and now I've got that file just like I had before.
So, great screenshot shortcut so you don't have to remember which one of those ones did what you want. Just Shift Command 5 and you've got everything laid out there in front of you. This is just a really handy thing. The other thing I want to point out is you do still have the option to save it to Clipboard rather than save it to a file. It's just one of these Save To options here. 
You can also say I want it to always go directly to Mail. If you have some sort of task where you're just constantly taking a screenshot and sending an email. You can set it up as Mail. You can set it up as Messages. Or you can have it just open up in Preview. So I can set it here and it automatically opens up the document in Preview here. It doesn't go to the little thumbnail at the bottom right. 
There are tons of options. Really well expanded and, of course, let's not overlook the video option as well. So I can record the entire screen. Hit Record. I can set which display since I have three displays so I'll do this one. You can see I get the little Stop button there to stop recording. There's the movie file. It started saving it. I'll hit Stop recording and now it opens it up in QuickTime Player when I'm done. Great new Screen Capture options. It's pretty much equivalent to a screen capture type of app that you may buy. But now it's just built into the operating system.

Comments: 10 Responses to “Taking Screenshots In macOS Mojave”

Ellen Gesell

6 years ago

I would like to be able to insert my screenshot into the body of an email, not as an attachment.
How do I do that?

Gary Rosenzweig

Ellen: Whether the image is "in the body" as "as an attachment" isn't really any different. Anything "in the body" will be an attachment. Anything "as an attachment" should show up in the body, perhaps at the end if no other place. It really depends on the receiver, not the sender as the receiver's email app will choose how to display attached images.
If you want to place the image at a spot in a message, and the receiver is also using Apple Mail with a recent version of macOS, then you can just use the "Mail" option in the screenshot shortcut. The image appears in the message and you can put text before or after it, move it around, etc.

Lynda Farabee

Gary, recently I read something about ability to take a screenshot with a drop-shadow...I cannot find the key strokes for that anywhere. I'm still on High Sierra. Shift-command-4 is usually what I use, I remember the space key added a "camera" cursor....but then I get the entire screen and no shadow. Can you help me?

Lynda: You use Shift+Command+4. Then press Space. Then click on the window you want to capture. That gives you a shot of that window with a drop shadow under it.

Andrew Bullard

Hi Garry
I have used screenshots since for ever to individualize all my standard blue folder icons
However using screenshots in Mojave do not work very well. Each Mojave screenshot seems to be very pixel reduced to make the resulting individualised folder very blurry.
Any idea how to retain the screenshot when used this way to a pixel increased screenshot? I get info on the desired folder click the pic in the get info box and paste that screenshot?

Andrew: Yes, you are right. I have seen this bug. I'd report it to Apple and hope a fix is coming soon.

That works for windows, Gary...Shift=Command=4 then Space, but not for "selections." I usually don't want an entire window, just a selection. I noticed while researching that command in terminal will turn the shadow off and on, but then another command (UI something) is necessary. I don't know my shadow got turned off, I don't know if it's turned off. Leary of doing much in terminal unless 100% sure.

Lynda: Drop shadows are for windows. I don't think there is a way to do it for selections. But you can easily do that in an image editing app if that is your goal.

Good to know, Gary. Yes, I could do that in image editing app, just thought it would be nice to come already done with selections. Is this possible in Mojave, do you think?

Lynda: Same in Mojave.

Comments Closed.

Taking Screenshots In macOS Mojave

Comments: 10 Responses to “Taking Screenshots In macOS Mojave”

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