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LightDemon69

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 3, 2008
85
0
Levan, Utah
The shortcut to grab a selection of the screen (Cmd+Shift+4) always "grabs" the picture as a PDF on my desktop. Whenever I use this on any other Mac besides mine it saves them as JPG's. With mine, I take a picture, open the PDF in Preview, and then have to export it as a JPG. It gets really tiresome. I know I could use the Grab Utility, but this way is much easier and faster and if I could continue to use it I would love to. Does anyone know how to change the settings for this to make it save JPG's instead of PDF's?
 
Could you right-click or control-click on the picture in question and choose "Get Info" and tell us what it says in regards to "Kind". Should be a PNG, not a JPEG.
 
You can change the screenshot format via the command line in Terminal, but I'd probably recommend downloading TinkerTool...a very handy tweaking app that makes it simple to change the settings for this (see the "General" pane) and lots of other settings.
 
Could you right-click or control-click on the picture in question and choose "Get Info" and tell us what it says in regards to "Kind". Should be a PNG, not a JPEG.

that's exactly what I just wrote, it isn't saving in the right format. I would LIKE for it to save as a PNG or JPG, but it uses PDF's.

You can change the screenshot format via the command line in Terminal, but I'd probably recommend downloading TinkerTool...a very handy tweaking app that makes it simple to change the settings for this (see the "General" pane) and lots of other settings.

I downloaded Tinkertool, but don't see anything in the General Tab that would fix this. Do you know how I could change it in the Terminal?
 
Not only don't a see a quick fix for your problem, but, my Grab shortcut always saves it as png but in Mac Help, they say that "Grab saves screen shots in TIFF format".
Klunky, but you can write an AppleScript to batch open and save in Preview. You can do this in Photoshop.
 
I downloaded Tinkertool, but don't see anything in the General Tab that would fix this. Do you know how I could change it in the Terminal?

The "General" tab should look like this:

3General.png

Notice that the second item on the page is "Screenshot file format." Are you not seeing that?

Edit: Sorry, forgot to give you the Terminal command. You should be able to change the format by typing this:

Code:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
 
The "General" tab should look like this:

View attachment 117974

Notice that the second item on the page is "Screenshot file format." Are you not seeing that?

Edit: Sorry, forgot to give you the Terminal command. You should be able to change the format by typing this:

Code:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg


No I do not see that option, it must not be available in Panther. This is what I see:

window.jpg


And the Terminal command didn't work. Since I'm a complete AppleScript n00b, could someone tell me how to write a script that would open all PDF files on my Desktop with Preview and Export them as JPG's?
 
Ah, gotcha...I had forgotten that you couldn't change it in Panther.

Try this AppleScript to see if that works for you.

Awesome thanks! not to sound too picky or anything, but since I'm understand next to nothing about scripts, how would I change that script to always save to the desktop instead of asking me everytime? Also, is there a way I can make it capture a selection of the screen instead of the whole screen?
 
Awesome thanks! not to sound too picky or anything, but since I'm understand next to nothing about scripts, how would I change that script to always save to the desktop instead of asking me everytime? Also, is there a way I can make it capture a selection of the screen instead of the whole screen?

Don't waste time with tinkertool or the applescript trick. Just use ShotChoice: http://www.grepsoft.net/shotchoice.html

It's one-click setting for which format you want.
 
Awesome thanks! not to sound too picky or anything, but since I'm understand next to nothing about scripts, how would I change that script to always save to the desktop instead of asking me everytime? Also, is there a way I can make it capture a selection of the screen instead of the whole screen?

I'm not sure. I'll take a look at it, but I don't have time right now. I'll get to it ASAP though.

Don't waste time with tinkertool or the applescript trick. Just use ShotChoice: http://www.grepsoft.net/shotchoice.html

It's one-click setting for which format you want.

Again, like TinkerTool and the Terminal command, ShotChoice only works on 10.4 and later.
 
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