Customize Mac Screenshots With These Keyboard Shortcuts
We’ve talked about some quick little tricks for taking macOS screenshots before – and, yes, I always have to look for what keyboard shortcut allows you to capture windows with and without fancy borders and shadows . But local finance queen Lifehacker turned screenshot master Lisa Rowan recently told me about a small screen hack on macOS that I didn’t know about before. I am now sharing this with you.
It’s so simple that you’ll wonder why you’ve never noticed it before – unless everyone else has noticed it before, and I just don’t know how to label a screenshot. Anyway, here’s the trick. When you use Command + Shift + 4 to draw a square around some part of the screen to take a screenshot and you screw it up and run it in the wrong place, don’t give up. Instead, hold down the spacebar and you can move that rectangle wherever you want. Release the space bar and you can continue to resize it as before.
It’s a lot more fun to see it in action, so here it is:
But that’s not all.
If you hold CTRL + Command + Shift + 4 , the screenshot you are taking will be saved to the clipboard instead of the desktop. If you just want to copy and paste something elsewhere, it will save you a few steps.
Jab Command + Shift + 4 and then release while you are still holding the trackpad or mouse, and then you can use Shift to lock the x or y axis of the rectangle. If you hold Option / Alt instead, you will be able to expand and contract the rectangle from its center (rather than from the default corner).
And if you want to have fun and, for whatever reason, only take a screenshot from the touchpad, that’s Command + Shift + 6 .
Of course, you can also just press Command + Shift + 5 in macOS Mojave or later to open the screenshot app, which gives you many options to customize what you photograph, where the resulting file will be saved, and whether you want do you turn on the timer or not.
How to super customize your screenshots via macOS terminal
Open Terminal and enter the following commands to tweak your screen settings all over the place (courtesy of Corey Ginnivan’s excellent thread ):
by default write com. apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true – Change “true” to “false” to permanently disable shadow on your screenshots.
by default write com. apple.screencapture type -string “png” – replace “png” with a different file format (for example, “jpg” or pdf “) to save your screenshots with this type, not png
by default write com. apple.screencapture location -string / Users / $ {HOME} / Desktop / —Change location to change where macOS saves your screenshots.