The Macintosh operating system has always made it easy to capture a screen shot. A screen shot is an image of your computer desktop or an active window. Here's a summary of all the keyboard shortcuts you can use to capture your screen in Mac OS X.

A. Entire screen:

To capture everything that goes on the PC screen, the user must tap on the “ Record Screen ” button. After this selection is made, a panel showing all of the options for Mac screen recording will start. In the “ Select Area “, you can define whether you want to capture “ Full Screen ” or a portion of it. Take screenshots or record the screen As you can probably imagine, we use these shortcuts a lot here at Macworld. There are actually several ways you can take a screenshot on a Mac.

To capture the entire screen, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop with the filename starting with “Picture” followed by a number, example Picture 1, Picture 2, and so on.
To copy the entire screen, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program like PowerPoint, Word, Photoshop, etc.

B. Portion of the screen:

To capture a portion of the screen, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop following the same naming convention as explained on the first tip above.
To copy a portion of the screen to the clipboard, press Command-Control-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, you can paste the screen shot to another application.

C. Specific application window:

To capture a specific application window, press and hold Command-Shift-4 then tap on the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
To copy a specific application window, press and hold Command-Control-Shift-4 then tap on the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, which you can move around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and you can paste the screen shot into another application.

Free Recorder For Mac

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Have you ever guided your grandma, who called asking for help, through zipping a file and attaching it to an email? Like, with words? It's literally painful.

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Frequently asked Mac screenshot questions

We've shown you how to grab a screenshot, record screen video footage, and create animated GIFs, now it's time to answer some of your burning screenshot-related questions.

There's good reason why 'show, not tell' is the rule of thumb for everything from UX design to tech support. So if you need to explain to someone how to do things on Mac, there's no better way than a snapshot, screencast, or animated GIF. In this post we'll show you how to do all three.

How To Paste Screenshot On Mac

If your question isn't answered here, feel free to ask it in the comments and we'll do our best to answer it there.

How to grab a screenshot on Mac

Everyone knows there's a keyboard shortcut for that, but clearly not everyone remembers what it is, judging by some 100,000 people googling 'how to take a screenshot' every month. To capture your Mac's screen, you can either rely on the macOS native snipping tool or get third-party software that's good for the job.

Apple's keyboard shortcuts to capture a screenshot

Here's a quick reminder for you with the combinations that capture screen on macOS:

⌘ + Shift + 3 to take a screenshot of the whole screen

⌘ + Shift + 4 to capture a selected area

⌘ + Shift + 4 + press Space to take a quick screenshot of the active window.

The resulting image will appear on your desktop as a .PNG file.

With transition to Mojave, the macOS snipping tool became even handier. The new shortcut has been added, and it's powerful – covering all the controls you need to capture a screen. Press ⌘ + Shift + 5 to launch the panel and see the options. They all are close at hand now.

Once you take a screenshot, it instantly appears at the right bottom of your screen as a floating thumbnail. Without digging around, you can edit, annotate, and share screen captures from there.

Why use a third-party screenshot utility?

These four shortcuts will suffice if you need to quick screen capture for your Mac's visible part of the screen. There is a number of limitations, though:

You can't capture a scrolling Web page using native shortcuts.
In case you have a cluttered desktop, you should prepare it for screen capturing by clearing away the icons.
Apple's snipping tool lacks easy-access perks and sharing options – all screenshots are automatically saved to desktop.

Luckily, there are some apps that do that, so you should have no trouble finding a good one. Our personal favorites are Capto, a multipurpose screen capture utility for macOS, CleanShot for clutter-free screen recording, and Dropshare to store and share your screenshots.

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Is it possible to screenshot my Mac remotely?

If you're away from your Mac but need to grab a screenshot of your home desktop, you can do this by enabling Screen Sharing.

Go to System Preferences and click Sharing.
Click the Screen Sharing checkbox (if Remote Management is selected you'll need to deselect it for this to work).
Select the All users or Only these users (if your Mac has multiple users you can choose to give access to specific users or groups).

Now that Screen Sharing is set up, you can access your Mac from another computer. To take screenshot of a remote users desktop:

Open a Finder window. Put the pointer on Shared and click Show.
Click All to see the available computers and select your Mac from the list.
Click Share Screen.
Go to Screen Sharing > Preferences and set the Display to Scale to fit available space or Show full size depending on how large the screen of the computer you're working on is.
Use the Snipping Tool method to capture a screenshot.

How to use snipping tool to capture screenshots

There's a set of tools that make your screen capturing journey easier. Spolier alert: you can get your hands on the full pack at once.

Use Capto to screen grab on Mac and edit the resulting screenshot the way you like: add captions and arrows, highlight or underline important parts, and what not. When you're done, you can save the screenshot in the format and resolution you need or just share it via Mail, Messages, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

To keep your captures and recordings in one spot, you should try Dropshare. Setapp users get a complimentary plan from Dropshare – 10 GB of free storage. Should you take tons of screenshots for any specific task, your disk space won't drain. What's more, Dropshare ensures your content travels safe. You can share your screen recordings as password-protected links.

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Screen Record On Mac Shortcut