How to take a Screenshot in Mac OS X [Tutorial]

Even if you are a professional photographer, you don't have to use your camera to take a screenshot of your Mac!

Let's see the useful keyboard shortcuts that you can use on Mac OS X:

• Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the Desktop


• Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area, and save it to the Desktop


• Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window, and save it to the Desktop

Using the Control key in addition (ie: Command-Control-Shift-3) the image will be saved to the clibpoard

While selecting an area (Command-Shift-4 or Command-Control-Shift-4) you can held down the following keys:

• Space: to lock the size of the selected region and instead move it when the mouse moves


• Shift: to resize only one edge of the selected region


• Option: to resize the selected region with its center as the anchor point

Advanced configuration

If you don't want to save all your screenshots to the Desktop, you can change the default folder using the Terminal. I created a "ScreenShots" folder in my Home Directory. In order to use it you have to type the following line in the terminal (of course you can choose another name and change the command accordingly):

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/ScreenShots
killall SystemUIServer

You can omit the second line, but you will need to log out and in again for the change to take effect, because the SystemUIServer user process handles screenshoot commands and you have to restart it somehow :)

This screenshot was taken using Command-Shift-4, then space, then click on the Terminal window

Default image format is .png, but you can change it using this commands:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
killall SystemUIServer

Where image_format can be jpg, tiff, pdf, png, bmp, pict or others.

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