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Taking a screenshot on a Mac® is as easy as on a PC—when you know the keyboard shortcuts to do so.
There are plenty of key commands in macOS® you might want to use for screen capture. Today, we'll break down the six best shortcuts for screenshots that any Mac user NEEDS to know—plus the one useful application that accomplishes all that and more with just one click.
Capture a Screenshot of an Area
Figure 1 – Keyboard shortcut for taking a screenshot of part of a Mac screen
One of the most common needs for that 'print screen' command on a Mac is when we need to capture a portion of the screen. It's like a snipping tool for Mac. Be it an Instagram story, Twitter update, or part of a webpage to share with a colleague, you can screenshot any of those with just a few key combos.
(1) To capture a portion of the screen, do the following:
- Press Command-Shift-4 to change a pointer to a crosshair.
- Select the area of a screen you want to capture by moving and dragging the cursor.
- After releasing the mouse button, the screenshot will be saved as a PNG image on your desktop.
Figure 2 – Apple Support tweets the solution for screen capturing on Mac.
Sky jumper (treestudiosuniverse) mac os. (2) To copy a portion of the screen to the clipboard, do the following:
- Press Command-Control-Shift-4 to change a pointer to a crosshair.
- Select the area of a screen you want to capture by moving and dragging the cursor.
- After clicking on the mouse, the screenshot will be saved to the clipboard.
- Select the application where you want to insert the captured image, such as Word, Skype, or Outlook.
- Press Command-V to paste the screenshot.
Capture a Screenshot of an Active Window
Figure 3 – The process of taking screenshots of an active application
If you need a screenshot of a specific application that you're currently using, use this method. You can easily print screen an active window of any program, be it Safari, Chrome, Photoshop, or Microsoft Excel.
(3) To capture a screenshot of an active window, do the following:
- Press Command-Shift-4 to change a pointer to a crosshair.
- Tap on the spacebar on your keyboard. The cursor will change to a camera.
- Select the active application window you want to capture by moving your cursor.
- When you move the cursor over an application, the window will be highlighted.
- Click the mouse button on the window you want to capture. The screenshot will be saved as a PNG image on your desktop.
(4) To copy a screenshot of an active window to the clipboard, do the following:
- Press Command-Control-Shift-4 to change a pointer to a crosshair.
- Tap on the spacebar on your keyboard. The cursor will change to a camera.
- Select the active application window you want to capture by moving your cursor.
- When you move the cursor over an application, the window will be highlighted.
- Click the mouse button on the window you want to capture. The screenshot will be saved to the clipboard.
- Select the application where you want to insert the captured image, like Word, Skype, or Outlook
- Press Command-V to paste the screenshot.
Capture the Entire Screen
Figure 4 – Keyboard shortcut for capturing the entire screen on a Mac
(5) To capture a screenshot of a whole page, do the following:
- Press Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot of the whole screen.
- The screenshot will be saved as a PNG image on your desktop.
(6) To copy a screenshot of a whole page to the clipboard, do the following:
- Press Command-Control-Shift-3 to copy the whole screen.
- The screenshot will be automatically saved to the clipboard.
- Select the application where you want to insert the captured image, like Word, Skype, or Outlook
- Press Command-V to paste the screenshot.
Mac App for Taking Screenshots
Figure 5 – Parallels Toolbox: The ultimate Mac application for screen and video capturing
Sometimes, remembering all the dozens of shortcuts to take a Mac screenshot is not our main priority. All we need is a simple application that has everything ready for us with just one click.
Parallels® Toolbox Screen and Video Pack is the best Designed to help optimize your workday, it has all the important tools for everyday needs, such as screen and video capturing, video converter, YouTube video downloader, and more.
You can try Parallels Toolbox without any obligations and decide for yourself whether a small introductory price is a fair cost for all the time saved.
Where to Find Screenshots on a Mac
Figure 6 – The primary location for all screenshots on a Mac is the desktop
Once you're done taking them, where do screenshots on a Mac go?
Normally, screenshots are saved as PNG images (titled with the current date and time stamp) right on the desktop. The format looks as follows: 'Screen Shot 2018-07-04 at 12.25.36.png'. Alternatively, a user can copy Mac screenshots to the clipboard by adding Control to the key combination and then pasting it right in the needed document. Here at Parallels, we practice this often—we love taking a MacBook® screenshot and sharing it with coworkers. It's an easy and quick way to effectively communicate what we see on our end.
What to Do if Screen Capture on Mac Is Not Working
The shortcuts for screen capturing may not work for a few reasons. One of the most common ones: they are simply disabled.
To fix that, do the following: Nurturer mac os.
- From the Apple menu in the top left corner, open System Preferences and click on the Keyboard.
- In the new window, click on Shortcuts.
- Find Screen Shots in the left menu.
- Check if the shortcuts are active and have the same key combos you type.
- To change a shortcut, select it and click the new key combination.
If the shortcut is working but screenshots turn out blank, the reason is often copyright issues with the third-party application on the screen. To solve that, use the Parallels Toolbox application for screen capturing.
After a long development period of over a year we finally have a Greenshot version for OS X. Greenshot for Mac is not just a port of the Windows version but a complete new development. We evaluated a lot of possibilities to share code between the platforms, but at the time being none of them lead to satisfying results, so we decided to buy a Mac, download XCode, learn Swift, get skilled in completely unknown terrain and build Greenshot for Mac up from scratch.
As of today, Greenshot is available in the Mac AppStore for all Macs running OS X 10.10 and newer.
Many of you will have some questions, we suppose, so to answer some in advance, here's a litte FAQ:
Is it the same as the Windows version?
Definitely not. It's not as feature rich, it's only available in English at the moment and there's still a lot of work to do, but the main features are there. If you are used to using Greenshot you may miss one feature or another but you'll feel right at home.
- From the Apple menu in the top left corner, open System Preferences and click on the Keyboard.
- In the new window, click on Shortcuts.
- Find Screen Shots in the left menu.
- Check if the shortcuts are active and have the same key combos you type.
- To change a shortcut, select it and click the new key combination.
If the shortcut is working but screenshots turn out blank, the reason is often copyright issues with the third-party application on the screen. To solve that, use the Parallels Toolbox application for screen capturing.
After a long development period of over a year we finally have a Greenshot version for OS X. Greenshot for Mac is not just a port of the Windows version but a complete new development. We evaluated a lot of possibilities to share code between the platforms, but at the time being none of them lead to satisfying results, so we decided to buy a Mac, download XCode, learn Swift, get skilled in completely unknown terrain and build Greenshot for Mac up from scratch.
As of today, Greenshot is available in the Mac AppStore for all Macs running OS X 10.10 and newer.
Many of you will have some questions, we suppose, so to answer some in advance, here's a litte FAQ:
Is it the same as the Windows version?
Definitely not. It's not as feature rich, it's only available in English at the moment and there's still a lot of work to do, but the main features are there. If you are used to using Greenshot you may miss one feature or another but you'll feel right at home.
Why is it not free? How much does it cost?
We decided to charge a little fee for Greenshot for Mac, because of the very high effort we had to make to bring it to you. It was really time consuming and also expensive. Plus Apple charges us for being in the AppStore and we really want to use their infrastructure, because it brings a lot of security.
Mini harvest - v1.1! (now mac os and linux compatible!) mac os. For a start Greenshot for Mac will be available for around 2 bucks and after adding new features we may rise it a tiny bit to cover our costs. Nevertheless, Greenshot will still be one of the cheapest screenshot tools for Mac.
By the way, developing Greenshot for Windows causes costs for us as well. As with all other open source software, you don't really have to donate but we developers rely on our users to do so.
Shoot Everything Mac Os Catalina
Why is it not open source?
That's mainly because of the competition. There's a lot of good software for OS X out there but only a few supply their source code, so everyone has to figure the code out by themselves. There seem to be some unwritten rules in the market and we don't want to break them. This may change in the future but for now, we'll stick with closed source for Mac.
Will the Windows version be closed source too?
Shoot Everything Mac Os 11
No. Never. You can trust on that. Windows has a completely different ecosystem and we are convinced that open source is a good thing, so we'll leave everything as it is right now.
We hope, you'll like it
To download, search for 'greenshot' in the Mac AppStore or click here
If you encounter any trouble, please file a bug here
