How to Take a Picture on Mac
If you’ve just moved to a Mac from Windows, you should know that your new computer has all the tools you need to take screenshots. Your Apple computer may not have a standalone screenshot app, but you can easily take a screenshot on your Mac using a keyboard shortcut.
How to Use Mac’s Built-in Cutting Tools
The Windows Snipping tool basically takes four types of snapshots: full screen, rectangular, single window, and selection. You can emulate all of this on a Mac using keyboard shortcuts. To take a full screen screenshot, press Command+Shift+3 . This will automatically take a screenshot of the entire display.
To take a snapshot of the selected area, press Command+Shift+4 , click and drag the area you want to capture, and then release the trackpad or mouse button when you’re done. By clicking and dragging, you can hold down the spacebar to move the selected area . This is a useful trick in case you accidentally move the selection.
Likewise, if you want to take a screenshot of a specific window, press Command+Shift+4 and then press the space bar . If you did everything right, the cursor will turn into a camera icon. Now you can click on the window you want to capture and your Mac will take a screenshot. You will notice that there is also a shadow effect in the screenshot. To avoid the shadow effect, hold down the Option key before clicking the window you want to capture.
How to set up screenshots on your Mac
When you’re ready to personalize your Mac screenshot workflow, press Command+Shift+5 to open the floating screen capture options window. First, you should change the default location where screenshots are saved on Mac. Click “Options” in the floating window and select the default location in the “Save to” section. You can select any of the listed folders, or select “Other Location” to set up your own folder.
There’s also an interesting option here – Clipboard – that copies all your screenshots and doesn’t save them to your Mac. If this seems too extreme for every screenshot, there are two more keyboard shortcuts you should look into. To copy a full-screen screenshot to the clipboard, press Command+Control+Shift+3 . You can do the same for snapshots of selected areas by pressing Command+Control+Shift+4 .
You can also set a screenshot timer : a five or 10 second delay before taking screenshots. This helps when you need a few seconds to check if everything is in place before taking a screenshot. To set this up, press Command+Shift+5 , select Options , and select either 5 seconds or 10 seconds under Timer .
macOS also has an easy way to show or hide the mouse cursor in screenshots . In the same screenshot options menu, click Show Mouse Pointer to show the cursor on screenshots. Alternatively, you can click “Hide Mouse Pointer” to make the cursor disappear on the final snapshot. You can even record your Mac’s screen using these built-in tools.
Your Mac has many screen capture features built into the OS by default. But if you need more features, you can replace the Mac’s built-in screenshot tool with something better . Third-party apps like CleanShot X offer many advanced screenshot features such as scrolling through screenshots, gif capture, improved annotation tools, and more.