Category Image Screenshots


Using Grab and default OS X settings can be slow when trying to construct a series of jpeg screenshots of portions of the screen associated with a tutorial article, but there are better ways to get this done without buying yet another little shareware utility...

This article in O'Reilly expands on the topic. I really like the built-in mac screenshot key combinations such as Command-Control-Shift-4 which provides a cursor for you to drag over an area of your screen and copies the image to the clipboard when you release the mouse.

Also, since most image captures I do are for web publishing, I prefer JPG than the default PNG. So, we can change the default to save us having to do time-consuming conversions as follows:

% defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format

options are not very well documented, but it seems the following work for sure:
pdf, png, jpg (or jpeg), tif (or tiff)
You must restart to have the change take effect unfortunately.

Here is a summary of the built-in commands. The file-save variations save to the desktop as Picture 1, Picture 2, etc.:

Table 1: Built-in Mac Screenshot Commands
Key Combination Result
Command+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard
Command+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard
Command+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard

Posted: Monday - October 16, 2006 at 03:00 PM        

Published by