How to take screenshots in Mac OS X?

Question

How do I take screenshots in Mac OS X?

Answer 1

• Command + Shift + 3 takes a picture of the whole screen;
• Command + Shift + 4 takes a picture of a portion of the screen;
• Command + Shift + 4, then Spacebar, allows you to take a picture of a particular screen element (a window, the Dock, the menubar, etc.)

If you want to put the screenshot on the clipboard (rather than creating an image file), hold down control while pressing the key combo.

Answer 2

Applications -> Utilities -> Grab

Not as easy as Print Screen, but gives you some more options.

Answer 3

You can press Cmd-shift-3 to dump the whole desktop as an image in your ~/Desktop folder, or Cmd-shift-4 to grab a sub area. Hit Cmd-shift-4 then press the spacebar to switch to grabbing a whole window.

There's also /usr/sbin/screencapture if you want to script it, etc.

Answer 4

If you are taking screenshots a fair bit, I reccomend LittleSnapper. Fantastic piece of software, and it can hide away in your menu bar and supports publishing to flickr, etc.

Answer 5

You can use command-shift-3 to take a screen shot, command-shift-4 to select a region, or command-shift-4 then space to select a window.

Answer 6

cmd-shift-3

cmd-shift-4 lets you take just a region of the screen.

Answer 7

Jing is pretty good at this: http://www.jingproject.com/ The CMD+SHIFT+(3 or 4) is OK, but extremely limited.

I've assigned a CTRL + PRINT SCREEN keyboard shortcut for Jing, it's much more effective than the default. Plus, you can annotate the screenshots you take. I also turn off the 'little sun orb' thing, that's just a useless gimmick. But once you set it up, Jing can prove to be very powerful.

I also have Little Snapper (from a bundle), but it's much less mature and has a few annoying quirks.

Answer 8

If you're a command-line junkie, check out man screencapture. It's surprisingly full-featured.

For example:

# Capture interactively - allow you to grab a portion of the screen
# Save item as snap.jpg
screencapture -i snap.jpg

# Capture interactive and open immediately in Preview
screencapture -iP snap.jpg

There are also options to pop the snap into a Mail.app right away (if you use that), for time delay, for including or removing the cursor, for window based or selected captures and so on.

Answer 9

If your not using Skitch, your doing it wrong. Serously, when it comes to grabbing an image, adding to it, sharing online, searching past clippings, or anything else screengrab related Skitch is far and away the best screen capture app out there for the Mac. And it's free

Don't believe me? watch the demo: Demo. In all seriousness this is close to my all time most essential OS X app.

Answer 10

⌘ + Shift + 3 or ⌘ + Shift + 4 depending on what you want

Answer 11

You can also use Grab utility, which supports capturing a marquee selection, whole window, timed screen, and whole screen. Grab can be found in the Utilities folder under Applications.

The only image format for screenshots taken by Grab is TIFF. This application is preinstalled on all recent macintosh systems including 10.5