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How to Control the Behavior of Screenshot Shortcuts in macOS

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Apr 12, 2001
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There are several ways you can take screenshots on a Mac. Preview offers the option from its File menu. There's also a little screen capture app in the macOS Utilities folder called Grab. But the simplest and most common method is to use your Mac's built-in shortcut key combinations. Taking a screenshot is as easy as hitting Shift-Command-3 to capture the whole screen, or Shift-Command-4 to capture a portion of the screen using the mouse cursor as a crosshair selection tool (a tap of the spacebar also turns it into a camera for capturing windows).

If you tack the Control key onto either of these shortcuts, macOS copies the captured image to the clipboard, which is useful if you want to paste it into an application that can edit or view images. Otherwise, screenshots taken using key shortcuts are saved straight to your desktop. If you'd like to change that default save location to somewhere different, simply follow the steps below. You can also change the default file format that the screenshots are saved in by following these steps. The last section of this article offers some tips for taking more control of your screenshot selections, so be sure to check those out too.


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Article Link: How to Control the Behavior of Screenshot Shortcuts in macOS
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/save-location-format-macos-screenshots/
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Is there a way to change the file format of the image copied to the clipboard (with control-shift-command-3 or 4) ?
The screenshots saved to the desktop have the new file format, but the ones on the clipboard are still TIFF… :(
 
Luke MacWalker said:
Is there a way to change the file format of the image copied to the clipboard (with control-shift-command-3 or 4) ?
The screenshots saved to the desktop have the new file format, but the ones on the clipboard are still TIFF… :(
Click to expand...
I don't know of a way to change that behavior, sadly. It seems to do with the way macOS deals with raw graphics stored in the clipboard. The grabbed image data has no file format until it's pasted out to another app, at which point its conversion to TIFF isn't associated with the original screenshot shortcut action, but is a function of the clipboard itself. Maybe someone else can chime in..
 
Tip: 1 When using the Shift-Command-4 shortcut combined with the spacebar to capture windows, you can eliminate the window's drop shadow from the screenshot by using Option-click instead of regular click.
Click to expand...

Now this is handy, as I do Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4-Spacebar many times throughout any given day, but I did not know that I could eliminate the dropshadow. This tip will save me plenty of time cropping it out in Photoshop!
 
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I use Greenshot on both Mac & PC - fantastic tool. Free on PC, couple of £ on Mac (natch) but well worth it IMHO.

Not had a need so I've not looked to see if it has a way of capturing toolbar on MBP but love the program.
 
This was super useful! I use command-shift-4 almost every day and I'm constantly trying to get only the window at hand in frame, the spacebar trick is very helpful, thank you!!
 
Please do more articles like these. Very helpful stuff, I’ve been using grab forever, I had no idea there were easier ways.
 
Thanks for doing this kind of article.

I was attracted to Apple's OS in the early 90s because of the intuitive and productive UI. Over the decades some things changed or I've forgotten about them, and some things I never knew. And unfortunately Apple has become increasingly less stellar about tutoring customers on all of the value-add tricks they have built in. We have to guess and dig.

So I find these focused, simple how-to posts quite valuable. I know it's possible to search the internet and find similar information, but I appreciate reading it on MR because I'm already here getting technical information and keeping up on news. If one of these how-to articles isn't applicable to me, it's easy to skim over and I'm not offended by its presence. Happy to have them rather than not!
 
DaPizzaMan said:
How is drag / drop broken?
Click to expand...

If I try to drag a captured image on to the desktop or into another application (mail, pages, etc...) more often than not I get a blank image rather than the content I snapped. I can use "copy image" from the edit menu and that works consistently or "export" from the file menu if I prefer to save. Prior to High Sierra though I'd just drag the bottom of the capture window and drop wherever I wanted, it was more efficient.
 
If you don't want to break your fingers with those crazy key combinations you can go to:
System preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Screen Shots
You can click on any shortcut on the right and use any key or key combination to assign it to capturing functions :)
 
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I scanned through and I don't believe this was mentioned. I very much dislike screenshots scattered about on my desktop, searching for the most recent when needed is a pain. I have them going to a folder on my desktop "Screenshots" with a simple terminal window command.

*Create a folder called Screenshots on your desktop (or another path/location if desired, change command to accommodate where they are to go.

*open a terminal window, copy and past the following:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/Screenshots


p.s. just noticed it was mentioned in the article... going to leave it here anyway
 
Anyone know why my Cmd-Shift-4 is now defaulting to window instead of selection? I have to tap the spacebar to get the crosshairs back -- it's the opposite of the default behavior!

Thanks for any insight...
 
With the new screenshot tools in 10.14 is it still okay to change the format of the screenshots from PNG? I would prefer jpeg, but I don't want to break anything. Also, anyone know if these same instructions work with 10.14?
 
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