1. Print Screen Button For Mac
2. Command For Print Screen Mac

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For many new Apple users, particularly those who are migrating from Windows and are used to that Prt Scrn (Print Screen) button, the answer to the question of how to screenshot on Mac isn’t immediately obvious.

Although it only takes pressing a couple of keys to take a screenshot on Mac, the fact remains that Mac screen capture is something that hasn’t historically felt all that intuitive. For example, in addition to different key commands for screenshotting windows vs. smaller selections, recording video of your screen for a long time was only possible through QuickTime Player.

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Although macOS Mojave has changed much of this, how to screenshot on Mac remains a heavy-hitting search query, as not everyone uses the latest version of macOS. Below you’ll find more information on taking a screenshot on Mac (and capturing video), as well as some useful tools to make your Apple screenshot life easier.

Exploring Mac Screenshot Basics

As there’s no dedicated button for print screen on Apple products, there are a few different commands associated with screen capture on Mac that vary slightly depending on your setup.

It makes sense to divide the world of how to take a screenshot on a Mac into pre and post-Mojave, since it was with this iteration of macOS that Apple really revolutionized their Mac screenshot command system.

1. Pre-Mojave Mac screenshot commands

If for whatever reason you don’t want to upgrade to Mojave then you’ll need to familiarize yourself with a couple of key Mac screenshot shortcut options:

• ⌘ + Shift + 3
• ⌘ + Shift + 4

The first of these commands is probably the easiest to get to grips with and the quickest one to take advantage of when taking a screenshot on Mac, as it captures the entire screen at once. If you’re using multiple screens, it takes a screenshot in Mac OS for every screen you’re using simultaneously.

The second of the commands represents a slightly more nuanced way to take a snapshot on Mac. Rather than capturing your entire screen, it prompts you to select the area you want to capture. If you follow it up with a press of Space, it allows you to choose the window you want to screencap instead.

Overall, while these commands do let you print screen on Mac, they feel sort of like an afterthought rather than a fully fledged feature of macOS. With so many people looking into how to screenshot on Mac, it’s not surprising that Apple recently decided to make it a little more clear how to screenshot in Mac OS Mojave.

2. Post-Mojave Mac screenshot command menu

In addition to the above commands, which still work for Mojave users, there’s now an option for them that’s very much in keeping with the existing format of how to print screen on Mac — ⌘ + Shift + [Number].

If you’re a Mojave user, you can use ⌘ + Shift + 5to bring up a screen capture menu that will allow you to:

• Capture Entire Screen
• Capture Selected Window(s)
• Capture Selected Portion
• Record Entire Screen
• Record Selected Portion

At the right-hand side of this menu there’s also Options that lets you (among other things) select where your MacBook screenshot and video output is saved.

In other words, anyone looking for an easy answer to the question “how do you screenshot on a Mac?” could do a lot worse than considering an upgrade to Mojave in order to streamline the process.

3. Third-party Mac OS screenshot apps

You might notice that, even with the inclusion of ⌘ + Shift + 5 Mac screen capturing menu, the options for taking a Mac screenshot remain pretty basic. If you’re looking for a snipping tool for Mac that can do a little more, you may need to turn to a third-party developer.

CleanShot X is unbeatable here. The app toolkit is tailored for 50+ different changes, which makes it an ultimate screen capturing tool for Mac. You can use CleanShot X to capture screen — whether it’s a window, full screen, area, or even scrolling content, as well as record video.

While capturing anything on your desktop, you can choose to hide all desktop clutter and disable desktop notifications in one click. Once you have your clean screenshot, open it from the overlay window that pops up, and start editing. You can add annotations, blur specific parts, or draw — CleanShot X will help you customize virtually anything.

A few not-so-obvious yet cool features to mention are self-timer, screenshot pinning, and internal cloud. Want to capture something with a delay? CleanShot X has a self-timer that will help you pick the right moment. If you want your screenshot to be visible on the screen, pin it to desktop. Finally, save your screen captures to the internal CleanShot Cloud and get shareable links in a flash.

If you’re looking for something with a little more emphasis on screen recording, Capto could be the ideal solution for you. In addition to recording video, or just taking a snapshot on Mac, you can also annotate and edit captures via an intuitive iMovie-esque interface.

Capto does wonders for software walkthroughs. And given its strong visual component, it’s also perfect for those with auditory shyness who would rather add captions than a voiceover. Capto’s built-in organizer is pretty helpful for keeping track of your screenshots too.

Mac OS screenshot organization

If you take a lot of screenshots then you’re probably way too used to your Downloads folder or Desktop being clogged up with images that have filenames like “Screen Shot 2019-XX-XX at 21.36.15”.

Unfortunately, this inelegant and cluttered outcome is the default Mac screenshot shortcut. Not particularly helpful for keeping all of your images in check, especially when macOS is prone to heavily abbreviating filenames.

While it’s possible to use Finder in conjunction with Preview to view all of your caps, that still isn’t a particularly satisfying visual experience. One of the best solutions is Inboard, which functions like a private Pinterest for your desktop and allows you to tag and filter all of your screenshots for later use.

Inboard takes care of the design savvy out there too with a feature that connects your Dribbble account to import all your likes for digestion at a later date.

But even once you’ve solved the question of how to do a screenshot on a Mac, sharing those screenshots with, say, colleagues or friends isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do.

Rather than emailing files back and forth, or having to upload everything to a public Google Drive, you might consider a solution like Dropshare. As the name suggests, it makes sharing screenshots (and other files) as simple as dropping them into the relevant area.

Dropshare connects with a range of major third-party cloud apps, but you can also lean on proprietary Dropshare Cloud if you prefer, which is helpful if you want to keep your Mac screen capture sharing separate from your other sharing activity.

The future of how to take a screenshot on a Mac

As you can see from above, learning how to screenshot on Mac isn’t particularly difficult, and screen capture on Mac is now easier than ever thanks to the addition of a dedicated MacBook screenshot and video capture menu in macOS Mojave.

It’s clear from this new feature that Apple understands the issue of how to print screen on Mac is one that has been, to put it lightly, unintuitive in the past, so you can likely expect to see further tweaks to the process in the future.

In the meantime, there are some excellent options in the snipping tool for Mac market that facilitate the process and offer a range of diverse features you won’t find among those built-in options for taking a screenshot on Mac.

Best of all, you can try all the apps mentioned here: CleanShot, Capto, Inboard, and Dropshare absolutely free with a 7-day trial of Setapp, a Mac platform with over 150 essential apps for any task at hand. Now you’re all set for your screenshotting game.

Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

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How to print screen on Mac? That sounds like a stupid question, but no one should feel shameful for something they are not familiar with. For example, if you’re just switching from Windows to macOS and find the screenshot methods that served for Windows no longer work. It frustrates people, but not necessarily for you since you have landed this tutorial.

Print Screen Button For Mac

Users switched from Windows or other operating systems are understandably at a loss on Mac. More often than not, when people need to take a screenshot, it is usually quite urgent, so we are going to introduce several methods to print screen Mac keyboard that are really straightforward even for newbies with no tech knowledge. You will know how to print screen on Mac to clipboard for pasting and save as a PNG or JPG image.

• Method 1. Print Full Screen on Mac with Keyboard Shortcuts
• Method 2. Mac Print Screen Selection with Keyboard Shortcuts
• Method 3. Print Screen on Mac with Keyboard for Particular Apps

Method 1. Print Full Screen on Mac with Keyboard Shortcuts

If you need to print Mac screen for primary use, such as showing some information to someone else, then the quickest and easiest way is by capturing the full screen with keyboard shortcut. Depending on how you’d like to use the screenshot, here are two shortcut groups.

1. Shortcut to print the full screen to clipboard
   Command ⌘ + Ctrl + Shift + 3
2. Print the full screen and save the file to the desktop
   Command ⌘ + Shift + 3

Method 2. Mac Print Screen Selection with Keyboard Shortcuts

This method will assist you with capturing chosen territory of our screen, for example, menu bar, opened applications, some piece of work area, some application window or whatever else. This method is apparently more useful than Method 1, especially for designers, IT workers, students, etc. Though a little time may be required for proficient operation, the investment will be proven to be worthy.

1) Capture selected screen to clipboard and paste in applications

• Step 1. Press Command ⌘ + Ctrl + Shift + 4. (For old Mac, press the Apple key ⌘ + Ctrl + Shift + 4)
• Step 2. You will see that your mouse cursor changes to “+” with pixel organized on the right.
• Step 3. Now snap and drag a rectangular around the area that you need print and release the mouse catch.
• Step 4. Now screen catch is saved on clipboard for further use in applications.

2) Capture selected screen save the file to the desktop

• Step 1. Press Command ⌘ + Shift + 4. (For old Mac, press the Apple key ⌘ + Shift + 4)
• Step 2. You will see that your mouse cursor changes to “+” with pixel organized on the right.
• Step 3. Now snap and drag a rectangular around the area that you need print and release the mouse catch.
• Step 4. Now screen catch is saved as a PNG image on your computer desktop or another specified location.

Method 3. Print Screen on Mac with Keyboard for Particular Apps

This method will assist you with saving a print screen of a specific application window, for example, internet browser, Keynote, Pages, Numbers or other. It would be really helpful for both daily and business work since these are common productivity tools. You will find the options in the method are similar to that in Method 2, but actually they differ in Step 3 and Step 4.

1) Capture a screen on Mac of specific applications to clipboard

• Step 1. Press Command ⌘ + Ctrl + Shift + 4.
• Step 2. You will see that your mouse cursor changes to “+” with pixel organized on the right side.
• Step 3. Now press the Spacebar (the wide button on your keyboard.
• Step 4. Now click on the app window that you want to catch in the screen print.
• Step 5. The screenshot is now saved on your clipboard for further use in applications.

Command For Print Screen Mac

2) Capture a screen on Mac of specific applications and save the file on the desktop

• Step 1. Press Command ⌘ + Shift + 4.
• Step 2. You will see that your mouse cursor changes to “+” with pixel organized on the right side.
• Step 3. Now press the Spacebar (the wide button on your keyboard.
• Step 4. Now click on the app window that you want to catch in the screen print.
• Step 5. The screenshot is now saved as a PNG image on your computer desktop or another specified location.

These 3 methods, actually 6 options, in this tutorial should be able to cover almost all needs for printing screenshot on Mac. You may have a try with them all and keep the best one for you in the mind, then practice it a lot. You will be highly appreciated to share this page to your social channels so that more Mac new users as well as you can review all available methods.

Change Mac Screenshot Format from PNG to JPG

The PNG format is compatible with most photo organizers and viewers, but the screenshot sometimes could be of a size up to 8MB, which is too big for file transfer means, like email. This case usually happens when your MacBook or iMac is equipped with a 4K monitor. Is there any workaround?

We can change the default format for screenshot by utilizing a basic terminal command. The terminal tool can be accessed at Applications – > Utilities.

Image formats widely supported by macOS X are PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF, etc. In consideration of versatility and size, JPG is recommended as the format of screenshot.

• Step 1. Open Terminal on your Mac as described above.
• Step 2. Copy and paste the command below to Terminal window, then hit Enter (Return):
  • defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

You may be required to enter your Mac password in order to execute the command. The change will take effect after the next rebooting.

Pro tips: The screenshots are usually named by letters and numbers, which is confusing at the first sight. Make sure to check the images carefully before deleting, especially when it is impossible to capture the same screen, like a game or streaming video. In case you need to recover mistakenly deleted photos or videos from Mac, please use Gihosoft Free Photo Recovery software as soon as possible.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have learnt several ways for taking screenshot on Mac computer. The methods are easy to follow and really similar to a certain extent, but they work for slightly different purposes. Therefore, please distinguish each method from the other by practice. Besides, you may need to add timestamp to photos so as to organize them well. If you have any questions or experience about screen shot on Mac, don’t hesitate to share with us in the comment.

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