If you’ve ever used Windows, you know taking a screenshot of your current desktop or application is as easy as hitting the ‘Print Screen’ key. Unfortunatly, those of us familiar with the Mac operating system and Apple hardware have never had the luxury of such a key. The big guys haven’t left us hanging though, Mac actually features many more standard screenshot features then any other operating system out there.
The easiest way to take a screenshot on your Mac is to use the Grab application located in /Applications/Utilities/Grab. Once you have started Grab all you have to do is click on the Capture menu and select the option that best represents what you want to capture on your screen.
The slightly more advanced, but significantly more ergonomical way of taking screenshots, is to use keyboard shortcuts! Here are the shortcuts and their corresponding actions:
- Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen then save it as a file on the desktop
- Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
- Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
- Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen then save it to the clipboard
- Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area then save it to the clipboard
- Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window then save it to the clipboard
You can also take a screenshot through the Terminal, by typing:
screencapture -iW ~/Desktop/screen.jpg
Depending on what version of OS X you have, the screenshot will be saved in a different format. In OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), the screenshot was saved as a JPEG (.jpg). In 10.3 (Panther) they changed it to PDF (.pdf). Later with 10.4 (Tiger) and on all screenshots are saved as PNG (.png).
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