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.
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)
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
Hold control to save to your clipboard instead of a folder/desktop.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
I never thought about changing the save directory to another folder. I’m blown away at the simpleness of it.
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!
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...
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)
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 yoinkWhy 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.
If you're in the cmd-shift-4 screenshot snipping mode and you've already started drawing your rectangle, you can press+hold space and drag around to keep your rectangle the same size and move it around.
The ones I use:
⌘⇧3: Full-screen screenshot
⌘⇧4: Select a screen region to screenshot
⌘⇧6: "Screenshot" of your TouchBar.
The last one is useful to me because I use the TouchBar as a tiny screen to output status and debugging information.
I use CleanShot X, which gives me a ton of easier options for this stuff (and the nostalgia from Skitch) -- highly recommend, included with Setapp too.
Another free screenshot tool from Zapier: https://zapier.com/zappy
Here's how to set screenshots to save in your Downloads folder:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Downloads && killall SystemUIServer
Since we're all sharing here, another tool I often use is Paparazzi – you give it a URL and it creates a screenshot of the site (including scrolling as needed). A nice way to keep a visual snapshot of a site for future reference. Its on the App Store or at https://derailer.org/paparazzi/
Ha, i just turned off my desktop so you can't see them all hiding there!
`defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false` `killall Finder`
Just pony up for Cleanshot - it's an absolute joy to use, extremely customisable and they ship updates at an impressive rate.
Random, related wish: I've always wanted a screenshot utility that captured windows/screens as PDFs (or SVGs), with each element as separate objects at their highest-available resolutions. For example, icons would be 512×512px objects. Vector representations would be created for controls like windows, menus, and buttons.
Screenshot folder was badass! Set it up ASAP!
> How can you make full-app screenshots (⌘ ⇧ 5 then space bar)
Ahem, cough ... Mr Testa, its 4, not 5 for full-app screenshots. ;-)
Related trick for changing an image's size, aspect ratio, or combining multiple images:
1. Open Preview.app.
2. Select the whole image and copy it [⌘-a ⌘-c].
3. Menu bar > Tools > Adjust Size then click the lock icon. Set to desired dimensions and save.
4. Paste the image over the distorted image. Do what you will with the extra space.
My workflow is take it, mark it up with Skitch if necessary, drop it in Slack or Trello and delete it.
The annotation tool in macOS is the worst. The amount of clicks it takes to add an arrow, position it, then add text by the arrow is insane.
I wish more people would be annoyed by this, but they’re not, so Apple will never fix it.
I still use Quicksilver, so I press the activation shortcut and type "sc" then enter and I'm into the screenshot app with it's UI available. I can't live without QS!
Is there any trick to record a video of a given app window only (or that covers area of a window)? Making screenshot is easy with pressing `space`, is there an equivalent for videos?
I usually use the screencapture command to take screenshots since it lets me specify an output file, e.g.
screencapture -ow /tmp/myapplication.png defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true; killall SystemUIServer
Tip, May be not a pro tip for people who can’t remember hot keys:
CMD + Space Screenshot enter
You can do everything from here. CMD shift 4, CMD shift 5, etc are all accessible through here.
Shameless question: is there a special trick to specify a filename for my screenshots in macOS? I manually rename after, and it's cumbersome.
The dock folder is a nice touch. I’m still stuck in a GNU/Linux style mindset, which is a ~/Screenshots directory pinned to Finder.
MacOS screenshot tool on steroids: https://cleanshot.com/
Windows folks : just get ShareX[1]
I usually use COMMAND+SHIFT+4 to select an area to take a screenshot of and then "Save to Clipboard".
I dunno. I think the shadow looks good
As for tip 2, just hold down alt. Takes a full window screenshot without the shadow.
nice. one blog post per year. this one is certainly once-a-year worthy.
OT but OP has same name as a notorious Philly mobster
I swear, I have zero understanding of why Mac users are so delighted when they discover previously-unknown features.
These features should be easily discoverable.
But maybe I'm missing a trick. Maybe there's a deliberate effort in Apple to make only a minimal viable subset of features easily discoverable. Maybe some features have their documentation hidden a little deeper. And maybe accidental discovery gives Mac users a little dose of feel-good neurotransmitters that keeps them passing over the odds for the products.
Honestly, it's a mystery to me.
Anyone from Apple product design here? Why is function discovery in Mac so opaque?
I just thought of the recent iPhone my partner upgraded to. No button. It's just a blank slate. Tap? Long press? Swipe down? Swipe up? Aah swipe up!
I swear, I find this shit absolutely infuriating.
windows has the best screenshot shortcut and it saves to clipboard it's so much faster
THERE ARE SCREENSHOTS SETTINGS?!
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The linked content feels very much like a "your first Mac" article. Do we really need this "hey if you bother to actually go into the settings of an app, you can change how the app works" type of content to hit the HN front page?
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.