Take a Snapshot on Your Mac Screen

This is a quick how-to post to take a snapshot on your mac screen

To Capture Any Part of Screen

  1. Press Command+shift+4 -> A cross-hair will appear allowing you to select any part on the screen.
  2. Select the part you want to snapshot by pressing mouse on one corner and releasing it once you reach the diagonally opposite corner of your selection. (simpler done than said 😉 )
  3. Mac would have taken a snapshot and copied it to a png on your hard disk. On Lion, this file will be called “Screen shot <timestamp>” and typically created on desktop.

A more handy tip is to use Command+control+shift+4 which directly copies the image to clip board and you can use Ctrl+V to paste it in your google doc or blog post, for e.g.

To Capture a Window

  1. Command+shift+4+ space bar gives you a camera!
  2. Drag the camera to any window and use mouse click to capture screen shot of that window and stores the image to a file like before.

Here again, Command+control+shift+4+ space bar is the combination to use, if you want to copy the image to  clip board.

To Capture The Whole Screen

  1. Command+shift+3  and Command+control+shift+3 are the combinations for capturing the complete screen to a file and to clipboard respectively.

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