macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

[susam]

Here is a key sequence I use very often. It takes a screenshot of a chosen window without the window's shadow.

- First, type command + shift + 4 (the mouse pointer turns into crosshair).

- Then type the space bar (the crosshair turns into a camera icon).

- Hover the mouse pointer (a camera icon now), to highlight the chosen window.

- Finally, hold the option key and click.

This sounds like a lot of steps but it becomes muscle memory pretty quickly.

[Hammershaft]

I think Mac OS has the most inaccessible hidden hotkey shortcuts out of every OS I've used. Even essential functions like showing hidden files in a directory is uniquely done through an hidden shortcut in Mac OS.

[rootusrootus]

Man, you guys are changing my life. LOL. I knew about cmd-shift-4 (and the ctrl version), but I never knew about hitting spacebar to make it do a window.

[hoten]

FYI, Cmd + Shift + 5 encapsulates all the various options into one UI.

[giantrobot]

Add in the control key in the shortcut above and the screenshot will go to the clipboard instead of a file. Useful for pasting a screenshot into something like Messages or Slack.

Also there's no need to hold down Option when clicking. You can however hit Esc to cancel the screenshot action.

[diffeomorphism]

Just for comparison:

https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/4/4c/Spectacledefau...

The default kde screenshot app just has simple dropdown menus for all that. Is command+$, space, option+click really better than PrtScr, click?

[faitswulff]

I just figured out that these generate really nice transparent borders, which they use to add shadows. They look great when you put them in, e.g., Notion docs.

[behnamoh]

You can change the Screenshots icon to something else too. Mine looks like this:

https://i.postimg.cc/zX5f4fqN/1.png

Makes it easier to find visually.

[pishpash]

What does holding option do?

[bradknowles]

You know, I'm looking at all the tips and suggestions here, and my thoughts keep going back to SnagIt from TechSmith -- these problems seem to all just go away with SnagIt.

Sure, it's cross platform, but I don't care about that. It works better for me on macOS than the native facilities, and provides much better post-screenshot editing.

If I want to do video capture, the industry gold standard here is Camtasia, also from TechSmith.

I know the standard provided functionality, and I just don't want to be bothered.

[jagged-chisel]

What does the option key do in this case? I'm familiar with all the other steps, but the option key's purpose eludes me.

[jarek83]

Nice one. I found that it only takes a separate window on the mac screen, but when I want to do it on additional display, it does not allow me to select a window - it highlights all the screen as a window.

[yieldcrv]

> - Hover the mouse pointer (a camera icon now), to highlight the chosen window.

bruh, what, god tier shortcut here

[max23_]

Wow thanks! Never knew about pressing the spacebar to toggle to window capture mode.

[robenkleene]

One for people like me who love to get the padding just right: Hold spacebar while dragging a screenshot area to reposition the upper-left corner of the drag area.

[Ivoah]

Or hold option to keep the screenshot area in the same position and resize both corners at the same time.

[njhaveri]

Wow, I had no idea about this one! Thanks so much for this tip!

[raarts]

Can you explain the exact steps more? If I press spacebar, the mouse pointer turns into a camera.

[maguay]

That's one I'd never found before. Thank you!

[hartator]

Literally live changing for me. Thanks robenkleene.

[smileysteve]

I recommend against changing the format from png to jpg. The sample shows a picture of a dog, but most screenshots should be of applications (having a limited color palette) and must of the time the goal is readability (jpg compression drastically reduces text clarity relative to png)

[rjmunro]

If you need to reduce the size of a screenshot it's often better to keep it as a PNG and reduce the number of colors. 256 colors nearly always carries all the information needed without blurring the edges or the text. Often 128 or 64 is fine. Don't use dithering - it harms the compression ratio, so you may as well use a few more colors instead.

Often just applying lossless PNG optimisations using a tool like https://imageoptim.com/mac will sometimes save a large percentage, although it can take a minute or so for the tool to finish.

[tobr]

> (having a limited color palette)

With translucency and soft gradients everywhere I’m not sure how true that is anymore.

[dontbenebby]

I agree with you parent.

Also, I was surprised one common hack I used to see talked about a lot not dicussed given they delved into changes you can make on the CLI: you can change the default location (Eg to a "Screenshots" folder) instead of the default of cluttering the desktop

In terminal type "defaults write com.apple.screencapture location" where "location" is a path of your choosing.

(I'm fond of nesting a "screenshots" folder in the user directory pictures folder.)

[dagmx]

You can just hit the option key to take a screenshot of an app without the shadow. No need to go and change system wide defaults

[kzrdude]

If screenshots are a part of the daily workflow, changing the setting makes everything easier

[hbn]

There isn't that much practical reason to include the shadow though. In fact it tends to just make the important stuff smaller when sharing with someone because there's a bunch of border space surrounding the content, and whatever they're viewing in will show all of that unless they zoom in.

[quitit]

This is the real tip.

[muhammadusman]

Hold control to save to your clipboard instead of a folder/desktop.

[hoten]

FYI, Cmd + Shift + 5 encapsulates all the various options into one UI.

[nsonha]

people love to talk about how many useful features MacOS has and how user-friendly it is but too many are buried behind a keyboard shortcut with no other way to access.

And no "read the manual" isn't it. From certain scale the manual should be out of the window and UI should accomodate for people to learn while using it.

[dchest]

Another cool trick: Acorn image editor can take screenshots of the whole desktop environment (all windows, menus, etc) and put them in separate layers. You can then rearrange them as you wish.

[saagarjha]

Tip if you’re doing the ⌘⇧4+ space trick to capture a window: if you hold down command while selecting a window you can grab things like alerts that appear as part of the window.

[m1keil]

If you need to do any image manipulations/highlight on your screenshots, two of the best tools I found are:

1) Monosnap (freemium) - https://monosnap.com

2) Cleanshot ($29) - https://cleanshot.com

Both tools also include large amount of extra functionality for taking screenshots and recordings.

[ale42]

If your screenshots are intended for documents, don't change the format to JPEG. Depending on the document (e.g. a PDF file) that compression can happen at a later stage. You can always compress a PNG into a JPEG (it's a lossy operation), but once it's done, you can't come back.

I often see JPEG screenshots in student reports (but not only), and they look really bad, as most of the time those are plots, drawings, and present very visible JPEG artefacts (e.g. colored noise around lines and text).

[Melatonic]

I thought this was going to about pranks

My favourite:

Take a full screenshot of your coworkers desktop - icons and everything. Include the taskbar.

Now rotate the screenshot left

Now set the taskbar to auto hide and rotate the screen settings (either on your monitor or the computer) to the right

Set that screenshot as your background

If you do it right it will LOOK like a normal desktop with taskbar and everything but the mouse will run in reverse and nothing of course will work well.

[gorgoiler]

Oh my goodness thank you so much macOS for giving us a set of awesome screenshot tools and a way to edit them immediately in Preview.app. (Capture to clipboard, then command-N in Preview defaulting to new-from-clipboard.)

It’s so blisteringly effective to grab a portion of the screen, draw on it, copy the whole thing again and paste it to a coworker in chat or a task tool.

I recently discovered that with my trusty Logitech G203 I can write cursive on my images with about the same legibility as I can on a whiteboard. Very pleasing.

[staindk]

Windows-only recommendation so this is only somewhat related - but if you want a powerful, (mostly) well-thought-out, (seemingly) lightweight screenshot taker + editor on Windows, do have a look at ShareX[1].

It's completely free and you can tweak various workflows and map them to key combinations. I've had a "manual screenshot -> optional editing -> upload to imgur/save to clipboard" workflow bound to a mouse button (Logitech G600) for over 5 years and use it multiple times a day.

I downloaded it through Steam but whatever other download options they have should auto-update just fine as well, I would guess.

I only see this now but apparently the program is open-source. Never even knew that.

[1] https://getsharex.com/

[rhinoceraptor]

This isn't totally screenshot related, but TextSniper is nice for quickly getting OCRed text from a selection on your screen, directly into your clipboard.

https://textsniper.app/

[kungfufrog]

Y'all definitely need to check out Shottr too, it has built in annotation and OCR and doesn't cost anything unlike CleanShot (which admittedly, is great too!)

https://shottr.cc/

[hk1337]

I never thought about changing the save directory to another folder. I’m blown away at the simpleness of it.

[CodeWriter23]

Screenshots folder in the Dock FTW!!

I must confess, I was pretty sure I’d learn nothing by clicking in. I was pleasantly surprised, thanks!

[Brajeshwar]

If one uses Dropbox too, letting Dropbox to manage screenshots is a clean way. I wrote about my steps at https://brajeshwar.com/2015/setup-dropbox-to-manage-your-scr...

[Domenic_S]

Want a quick measurement in px for something on your screen? CMD + SHIFT + 4 for the crosshairs, drag from origin to destination, observe the measurement in px. Press ESC to not capture anything.

(Only works for horizontal or vertical measurements, unless you're good at doing pythagorean theorem in your head)

[CharlesW]

Free Ruler (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free-ruler/id1483172210?mt=12) is handy to have if you find yourself needing this functionality often.

[swah]

This week's "superfluous" automation: quick screenshots from an Android device, to run with Alfred:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash

    if ! /usr/local/bin/adb devices | grep '\<device\>'; then
        echo "No phone connected!"
        exit 1
    fi

    phonemodel=$(/usr/local/bin/adb shell getprop ro.product.model | tr '-' '_')
    timestamp=$(date +"%Y_%m_%d_%Hh%Mm%Ss")
    output_file="Screenshot_${phonemodel}_${timestamp}.png"
    /usr/local/bin/adb exec-out screencap -p >$output_file

    #open -R $output_file # select in finder
    open -a Yoink $output_file # show in yoink

[llbeansandrice]

Why is cmd + shift + 4 the default that folks use/recommend? I've always used cmd + shift+ 5 which is the short cut to launch the full-blown screenshot app.

It remembers what you had set last time as well like capturing to clipboard and everything.