The Lamen
Moving to macOS can take some getting used to, especially if you’re coming from a Windows PC. One of the most annoying things about moving operating systems is memorizing certain shortcuts all over again. This guide tells you how to screenshot on a Mac, where to find these screenshots, and how you can edit them.
Apple’s macOS is the operating system of choice for many users, with reportedly over 100 million Macs currently in use. Still, it can be hard for a Windows user to switch operating systems, especially when it comes to some of the key shortcuts. Continue reading the article to learn how you can take a screenshot on your Mac.
Simply press and hold these three keys together: Shift, Command, and 3. This captures a screenshot of your entire screen.
If you wish to edit your screenshot, simply click on the thumbnail that appears in the corner of your screen, and make any changes you want.
Pressing and holding Shift, Command, and 4 makes a crosshair appear on the screen. Drag the crosshair across the desired area to capture a screenshot.
There’s more you can do after using the Shift-Cmd-4 combo:
This key combo allows you to select and capture a portion of your screen instead of the entire thing.
The Cmd-Shift-5 shortcut was first introduced with macOS Mojave in 2018. Instead of having you remember a bunch of shortcuts for specific functions, this combo calls up a small floating panel above the dock with multiple screen capture options.
The three buttons allow for screenshotting the following:
The dock also has two video-recording buttons that let you record your entire screen or a selection of it.
On the right side is an Options button, that lets you choose where you want to save the screenshot. It also allows you to set a 5- or 10-second delay.
You can close the dock simply by hitting the X button on the left or pressing the Escape key. However, if the Screenshot Toolbar gets in your way, you can simply drag it to a new spot on your screen by its left edge.
If you’ve got an older MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, you can also take a screenshot of what is currently showing on the Touch Bar. To do this, you press Shift, Command, and 6 to take a wide and narrow screenshot of your entire Touch Bar.
Once you take a screenshot, a Floating Thumbnail appears on the lower-right side of the screen. If you click on the Floating Thumbnail, you can gain access to several tools to edit your screenshot. If you simply want it to be saved at the last saved location, simply swipe it away or just let it go away on its own.
Right-clicking on the Floating Thumbnail allows you to:
By default, the Show Floating Thumbnail option is enabled on a Mac, like it is on iOS. Unlike your iPhone, however, you can turn the Floating Thumbnail off on Mac.
To disable the Floating Thumbnail option:
While the Floating Thumbnail can be irritating at times, the option to annotate a screenshot immediately after capturing it without looking it up is pretty handy at times.
By default, all screenshots save to your device with the name “Screen Shot [date] at [time].png.” To find a screenshot, you simply locate it using the finder.
In macOS Mojave or later, you can change the default location for your screenshots from the Options menu on the Screenshot Toolbar.
For new-time users, these keyboard shortcuts can get a bit much to memorize. Windows users have a particularly hard time giving up on key combos that have now become a part of their muscle memory.
Thankfully, you can customize the keyboard shortcuts on your Mac.
If you assign a keyboard shortcut to a command that already exists for another, the new shortcut won’t work. For it to take effect, you have to reassign the shortcut for one of the commands.
To return the shortcuts to their original combinations, you go to Keyboard settings, click on Keyboard shortcuts, and select Restore Defaults in the lower-left corner.