Mac OS X screenshots

You may not need to capture as many Mac OS X screenshots as I do but the next time you have the need, your Mac is ready to help. Every Mac comes bundled with a great utility just for this purpose but I also want to share a couple of shortcuts for quickly grabbing different types of screen captures right from the keyboard. Here’s how.

Grab utility

Go to Applications → Utilities and open the Grab utility. Look under the Capture menu title to see options for Selection, Window, Screen and Timed Screen.

Choosing Selection allows you to click and drag your mouse over an area of whatever size you wish.

Window allows you to single out a individual window. This works great for taking screenshots of dialog windows.

Choose Screen when you wish to grab full screen captures.

The Timed Screen offers a delay to give you ample time (10 seconds) to highlight something before the screen capture activates.

Keyboard shortcuts

If all you wish to do is grab a quick screenshot, then there’s no need to open the Grab utility. These keyboard shortcuts will allow you to quickly grab a screenshot right from your Mac keyboard.

Use Command+Shift+3 when you need a full screen capture.

Try Command+Shift+4 for the equivalent of the selection tool to grab partial screen captures.

This last one is a real finger twister. Use Command+Shift+4+Space bar to turn your cursor into a little camera. You can then use this to grab pre-cropped screenshots of items on the Dock or even individual menus.

Now you can take screenshots on your Mac with the best of them. This is how I grab screen captures for the images I attach to each Mactoid.