How to Take a Screenshot on Mac: Tips and Tricks 1

How to Take a Screenshot on Mac: Tips and Tricks

You may already know how to take screenshots on your Mac, but you may not know a few different ways to take better screenshots and manage them more easily. Here are a few tips and tricks you can try, along with a few apps you should check out that will let you easily manage your screenshot collection.

Screenshots are one of the underused features on a computer, and most people don’t even realize how useful screenshots can be in different situations. They can be helpful when troubleshooting an error message and post it on a community forum for help, or screenshots can be a quick way to share something popping up on your screen with a friend or family member.

Whatever you use screenshots for, here are some tricks to help you take better screenshots and make it easier for you and the person you’re sharing the screenshot with.

Keyboard shortcuts

The default keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots on Mac are quite confusing. Pressing Command-Shift-3 will capture the entire desktop space. Command-Shift-4 allows you to select a specific part of the desktop and take a screenshot from it.

However, you can easily change keyboard shortcuts by opening and navigating to . Double-click the keyboard shortcut you want to change and enter your own custom keyboard shortcut you want to assign. For example, I changed the shortcuts above to F12 and F11 respectively. Granted, these two keys were used for other shortcuts executing other tasks, but I never used them, so it wasn’t a big deal to me. Be aware of this when creating your own keyboard shortcut.

After replacing the screenshot keyboard shortcut with something a little more manageable, you can take advantage of a few cool tricks you may not know anymore.

To take a screenshot of a specific window open on the desktop, you’d probably take the screenshot picker and capture the window roughly that way, but you can also just press F11 (or Command-Shift-4 by default) and then Spacebar. Now all you have to do is highlight a Finder window or an application window and click to take a screenshot. To take a screenshot of only parts of a window, such as pop-ups or pop-up menus, you can go a step further by pressing the Space bar and then pressing Command.

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To take a screenshot, you can also press the Ctrl key along with your screenshot keyboard shortcut and have it automatically copied to the clipboard, where you can then paste it into supported apps.

Dropbox

You may know Dropbox as one of the most popular cloud storage services on the market right now, but did you know that it can also be used as a very useful screenshot sharing tool? One of the newest features of the service is the ability to automatically save and sync all screenshots to your Dropbox folder and then copy them to your clipboard.

dropbox-screenshots

This means you can take a screenshot using any of the keyboard shortcuts listed above, and then that screenshot can be automatically shared instantly, so you can simply take a screenshot and paste it into a chat or email. It will appear as a Dropbox file link.

To enable this feature, go to your Dropbox settings by clicking on the Dropbox menu bar icon and go to the . From there, click on the tab and put a checkmark next to it.

Evernote/Skitch

Similar to the fashion in Dropbox, albeit in a peculiar way, you can save screenshots to Evernote and share them with others. You will only need the Skitch app to do this. You can take screenshots in Skitch in many different ways, and this bypasses OS X’s default ways of taking screenshots.

skitch-evernote

Once you’ve taken a screenshot using Skitch, you can annotate it using many of the tools available in Skitch, and then save it directly to Evernote. From there, you can share it with friends and family just like you would share a traditional note: right-click the screenshot saved in Evernote and select . From there, you’ll have several sharing options to choose from.

Of course, there are many other screenshot tools available for Mac, OS X’s built-in Grab app is another popular option. It takes your screenshot skills to the next level, making it easier and faster to take them and share them with everyone.