Taking Mac Screen Snapshots

Sometimes it’s helpful to save a picture of your Mac’s screen, or a portion of the screen, for a project, as a receipt or for other reference. The Mac provides several ways to do this right from your keyboard. Hit the following keys together to capture screen images:

Note: the Command (CMD) key is also known as the Apple key

CMD-SHIFT-3   Saves a copy of the whole screen to the desktop

CMD-SHIFT-4    Cursor changes to cross hairs, allows you to outline a region to capture

Both these capabilities have long been part of the Mac OS. OS X also has the ability to cleanly capture a picture of a single window without the screen background or other annoyances:

CMD-SHIFT-4   Cursor changes to cross hairs, then hit the SPACEBAR
SPACEBAR   Cursor changes to a camera, move over the desired window and click the mouse to save picture

Try it and see what happens. I find this very handy to send pictures of error messages to tech support reps and for clients to send screenshots to me when they have problems.

Posted by Adam Rosen on 4 April 2015

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