How to take screenshots in Mac OS X?

How do I take screenshots in Mac OS X?

Solution 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.

Solution 2:

Applications -> Utilities -> Grab

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

Solution 3:

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.

Solution 4:

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.

Solution 5:

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.