How to take a screenshot on your Mac: 4 ways to capture your screen

Depending on the Apple computer you have — MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac — you may be able to snap a screenshot in one of up to four different ways.
If you want to capture what’s currently on your Mac, whether it’s event tickets, an email you’ve just received, or a photo of your desktop, then knowing how to take a screenshot is a crucial ability to have.

With keyboard shortcuts, you can capture a screenshot on almost any Mac — and on the MacBook with a touch bar, you can take four screenshots in one step. You will learn the numerous keyboard shortcuts required to take a screenshot on your Mac in this tutorial section. We’ll also walk you through what you can do with the screenshots you’ve taken after you’ve captured them. Apple provides many options for quickly saving, deleting, and opening a screenshot for marking up with text.

Command-Shift-3

This keyboard shortcut is used to take a screenshot of your full computer screen.

Shift-Command-4

Make use of this keyboard combination to transform your cursor into a crosshair, which you can drag to choose an area of your screen to record using a screenshot tool. To snap the picture, click and release the mouse button or trackpad.

After pressing Shift-Command-4, you can choose from a variety of alternative options:

Using the space bar, the crosshair transforms into a small camera icon, which you can drag over any open window to see what’s happening. Click on the window you wish to screenshot to begin the process. A screenshot taken using this method has a white border around it and a slight drop shadow around it.

After dragging to mark an area but before releasing the mouse button or trackpad, press and hold the space bar to do the following action: This keeps the selection area’s shape and size unchanged, but it allows you to move it about on the screen as needed. It comes in handy if your original selection region is a few pixels off; hold down the space bar to reposition it before releasing the mouse button to take a screenshot of the problem.

To lock in each side of the selection area made with the crosshairs except for the bottom edge, hold down the Shift key (after dragging to highlight a section but before releasing a mouse button or trackpad): This prevents you from moving your mouse up or down to position its bottom edge.

Release the Shift key and press it again to adjust the right border of your selection area without releasing the mouse button. By holding down the left mouse button or right touchpad button while pressing the Shift key, you can alternate between the bottom edge and the right edge.

Shift-Command-5

This combination of keys, introduced in MacOS Mojave (2018), brings up a little panel at the bottom of your display containing your screen capture options and other useful information. There are three screenshot buttons on the toolbar, which allow you to capture the entire screen, a window, or a selection of your screen, respectively.

You may also record your entire screen or a section of it using the two video recording icons on the sidebar. The screenshot panel can be closed by pressing the X button on the left, but you can also press the Escape key to leave out.

An Options button can be found on the right-hand side of the screen. Choose where to save your screenshot — Desktop, Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Message, Preview, or Other Location — and specify a delay of 5 or 10 seconds so that you may line up elements that might otherwise disappear if you used the screenshot tool immediately after activating it.

By default, the Show Floating Thumbnail option is activated, displaying a little preview thumbnail of the screenshot you just captured in the lower-right corner of your screen, similar to the screenshot method on iOS devices. On your Mac, unlike your iPhone ($899 at Amazon), you have the option of turning off the preview thumbnail. Finally, you have the option of displaying your mouse cursor in a screenshot or video.

Alternatively, if the screenshot panel is in the way, you can grab its left edge and move it to a different location on your screen.

Command-Shift-6 is a bonus for MacBooks with Touch Bars.

Was it ever dawn on you that if you have the 16-inch MacBook Pro or a similar model with the Touch Bar, you can capture a screenshot of whatever is now displayed on the Touch Bar? Press Command-Shift-6 to capture a screenshot of your Touch Bar that is both wide and thin.

Annotation made simple

If you choose Floating Thumbnail, you’ll have rapid access to Markup tools, which will allow you to annotate your screenshot more effectively. Floating Thumbnails can be removed by wiping them away or simply letting them disappear on their own, and they will be stored at the location where you last saved a screenshot. The Markup View preview window (not Preview) will open when you click the Floating Thumbnail, and it will have all of the markup tools available in Preview.