If you have ever written technical documentation or how to guides you know that screenshots can be worth a thousand words. We are going to take a moment to go over how to take a screenshot on Mac. We will go over how to access the feature and all of the options.
Accessing Mac Screenshot Tool
Mac has a built-in application for screenshots that can be accessed a few different ways. The first and simplest is to type “screenshot” into Spotlight Search. You can access Spotlight Search via the magnifying glass icon in the menu bar or by pressing Command + Space. You can also navigate via the Finder to Applications > Utilities > Screenshot. Either of these options will launch the full application and present to you a screen over lay with several options for taking a screenshot. I will go over each option a little later.
The next way to access the Mac Screenshot application is to use a keyboard shortcut. There are a few of these depending on the type of screenshot you need to take.
- Shift+Command+3 Takes a screenshot of the entire screen.
- Shift+Command+4 Displays a crosshair cursor on screen used to draw a box around an area to capture a screenshot.
Additional Tip: Hold control while dragging to crosshair to capture and it will copy instead of saving the screenshot. You can then paste the image. - Shift+Command+5 Opens the full Screenshot application
You can now take the screenshot with by clicking the selected region, pressing Enter or clicking the Capture button depending on the procedure followed.
Where Are My Screenshots Saved
Now that you have taken a screenshot you will see a preview in the lower right corner of your screen for a few seconds. You can click on this preview to make edits to the screenshot. The default settings will save your screenshots to the Desktop but you can change this in the options of the Screenshot application.