When putting together the earlier post I needed to grab some shots of the process and as always I’d forgotton the OS X screen grab shortcut keys so I thought I’d stick them down here.
- Command-Shift-3 will capture the whole screen and save it
- Command-Shift-4 perhaps more usefully will present crosshairs to allow the capture of a specific area of the screen and save it
Adding Ctrl to either of those combinations will do the same thing but store the image on the clipboard rather than to file.
By default the saved files are in PNG format (at least since 10.4 I think) and saved to the Desktop. To change either of these you can open Terminal and enter;
For the format:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
image_format can be a range of popular formats,PNG being the default,JPG,PDF,BMP and GIF being some of the other more useful variations
So to change to JPG would be
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
For the location:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder
For example:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/someuser/Documents/Screenshots
This setting seems to need the user to log off and back on to become active,YMMV.
