Mac OS X has numerous keyboard shortcuts, a handful of which will do screenshots for you:
- Shift-Command-3 : Screenshot of the whole screen, automatically saved as ‘Picture 1.png’ to your desktop.
- Shift-Control-Command-3 : Screenshot of the whole screen copied to the clipboard.
- Shift-Command-4 : Selection of the screen, automatically saved as ‘Picture 1.png’ to your desktop.
- Shift-Control-Command-4 : Selection of the screen copied to the clipboard.
I’ve found the ‘Shift-Command-4’ shortcut particularly handy (when I can remember it). It switches the mouse cursor into a cross-hair target and tells you the size of the image that you are selecting. Then *poof* the image file gets saved to your desktop.
Update: Mike Grace suggested Shift-Command-4 then press the space bar. That captures a screenshot of an entire window and saves it to your desktop as ‘Picture 1.png’. Nice!
6 replies on “Mac OS X Screenshot Keyboard Shortcuts”
Glad you found these great shortcuts! They save me tons of time and I use them all the time. Keep the great posts coming! : )
They really are very handy. If I can remember them I won’t need to worry about using the Grab utility anymore.
I like these so much, I’d really like to see Windows and other desktop environments adopt them.
I use Command-Shift-4 daily as a digital ruler almost everyday. Very handy when needing to measure an image/ad/div when doing design.
If you press ESC it will take away the crosshairs and not take the screenshot. Very nice.
FYI, in Snow Leopard rather then saving it as Picture1.png, it saves the file as something like Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 1.53.03 PM.png. Little nicer then Picture1.png when digging through lots of them.
Guess you don’t have to annotate your screenshots very often, or you would be using Skitch I bet.
That naming style does make more sense. I’ve been dragging my feet on upgrading to Snow Leopard, one of these days.
If I need to annotate it in some way I just use an image editor. But you’re right, most of my screen shot needs just involve taking the screen shot, not marking it up.