If you are looking to make a screen capture on a MacBook or iMac, the operating system already provides the tools required. With the help of a few hotkeys you can come up with a variety of different screen­shots. Below we explain which com­bin­a­tion of keys you need to press.

The most important in brief:

  • Capture the entire screen + save file to desktop: [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [3]
  • Capture a selected area of the screen + save file to desktop: [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [4]
  • Capture the entire screen + copy to clipboard: [Control ^] + [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [3] using the key com­bin­a­tion [Cmd ⌘] + [v] insert the screen­shot in the chosen location
  • Capture a selected area of the screen + copy to clipboard: [Control ^] + [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [4] using the key com­bin­a­tion [Cmd ⌘] + [v] insert the screen­shot in the chosen location

How to take a screen­shot on a Mac

Apple devices don’t have a ‘Print Screen’ button. It is this button that allows Windows users, with one single press of a button, to make a screen grab of everything on display on a monitor. Apple users will always need to press a com­bin­a­tion of buttons (a shortcut) to make a screen­shot on a Mac. There are different buttons depending on which area of a macOS or OS X you wish to make a screen grab of:

  • Entire screen: You can make a screen­shot of the entire display by pressing [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [3].
  • Rect­an­gu­lar area: Press [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [4] to grab a rect­an­gu­lar section of a screen. In this case, the mouse pointer will turn into a crosshair cursor. Move the cursor to where you would like to begin the screen grab, then click and pull to the desired size before releasing the mouse again. The screen­shot will then be performed at this moment. If you wish to cancel the screen­grab during the process, simply press the Esc button.
  • Window: If it is the case that you wish to save an entire window (and nothing else) as a screen­shot, then you should also be pressing the button com­bin­a­tion of [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [4]. Once again, your mouse will transform into a crosshair cursor. Now by pressing the space bar the cursor will become a camera symbol. Simply click on the window that you wish to make a screen­shot of. This process can also be cancelled at any time by pressing the Esc button.
  • Menu: Even a menu can be saved sep­ar­ately as a screen­shot on a Mac. To do this simply open the menu and press [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [4]. Using the cursor, click on the menu and create your screen­shot. However, this will not save the title of the menu. This can only be done if, prior to clicking your mouse, you transform the pointer into a crosshair cursor by pressing the spacebar. Now when you click into a menu, the title will also be a part of the screen­shot. Like with the other processes, you can cancel this process by pressing the Esc button.
  • Touch Bar: As of 2016, MacBook Pros are fitted out with an ad­di­tion­al nav­ig­a­tion bar – an OLED touch screen known as the Touch Bar. It is also possible to make a screen­shot of this display. A re­quire­ment for this is that you have the update macOS Sierra 10.12.1 or later. The shortcut key for this form of screen grab – as the Touch Bar is located un­der­neath the actual monitor – is [Shift ⇧] + [Cmd ⌘] + [6]. (It is also possible to install a button in the Touch Bar spe­cific­ally for the creation of MacBook screen­shots.)
Image: How to make a screenshot on a Mac
Press Command (⌘), Shift (⇧) and [3] on the keyboard sim­ul­tan­eously, to open the screen­shot mode.
Image: OS X desktop with an activated screenshot function
With just a few key com­bin­a­tions you can select the section of the screen that is important to you.
Fact

The command button (also known as the ‘Apple button’ has altered its ap­pear­ance through the years with the various Macintosh systems. Sometimes it has the well-known bitten apple, sometimes it has the looped square ⌘, and sometimes it is labelled with ‘cmd’ – in many cases also a com­bin­a­tion of these symbols. Normally the button is located right next to the space bar. The command button is used in Apple systems for keyboard com­bin­a­tions and shortcuts.

Re­gard­less of which section you have selected and which buttons you have pushed, the screen­shot will auto­mat­ic­ally be saved on your desktop as a PNG image file. The naming of the file is also done auto­mat­ic­ally by the operating system – all files names begin with the word ‘Screen­shot’ followed by the time and date that it was created.

If you would prefer that a screen­shot on your Mac does not directly turn into a file and instead is copied onto the clipboard (as is the standard with screen­shots with Windows), then this is also possible: by ad­di­tion­ally pressing the [Ctrl] button the Mac will store the screen grab in the clipboard. From here it is easier to transfer it to a word and image pro­cessing program that you might be working with. This process works with all Mac screen­shot shortcuts.

‘Grab’ tool: how to take a screen­shot on Mac

Image: Window function of the Grab software
With the Grab screen­shot software you can, for example, save a complete window.

It might be that you wish to take screen­shots on your Mac without using shortcut keys, and this is where the tool ‘Grab’ comes in handy. This software is already installed on every Mac operating system and can be found either in the ‘Utilities’ folder under ‘Ap­plic­a­tions’ or by using the ‘Spotlight’ search function. This helpful tool is easy to use and can be operated using the menu taskbar. Here you can select which area of a display you wish to save as an image file. Generally, you have the same options as with the keyboard shortcuts: entire screen, a selected window, or a self-de­term­ined section.

In addition to this, the software also has a timer function. This makes it possible to make changes on the screen before the screen­shot is actually taken. For example, this is very useful if what you wish to show requires the mouse to be held down.

Each time the screen­grab will appear in a new window. You can then decide what is to happen with it next – enter what the name of the file should be and then select where it should be stored.

Image: Timer function of Grab
This screen­shot tool also features a very useful timer function

Fur­ther­more, you can also use the preview tool when creating screen­shots. In the tool that you would normally use to open images and PDF files, you will find in the menu a ‘Create PDF’ from which you can select one of the three screen­grab options: ‘From Screen Capture’, ‘From Window Capture’, and ‘From Selection Capture’. The screen­shot can then be edited directly in the preview or saved in the various formats.

Common problems when making screen­shots on a Mac

It can sometimes be the case that making a screen capture on a Mac doesn’t work. This usually has something to do with the program that you are at­tempt­ing to display. For example, Apple has con­figured it so that it is not possible to make a screen­shot of a movie that is being played via the DVD player software. For copyright reasons, Apple has made it im­possible to make screen­grabs while the playback software is running. This is the case even if you have no desire to record any part of the movie in your screen­shot or you have even gone to the effort of getting the rights to the movie. To produce a screen­shot (of course only with material with which you are making no copyright in­fringe­ment), there are two round­about ways of doing this:

  1. Use an al­tern­at­ive playback program: Mac will not prevent you from making screen­shots if you use a different software for playing films and videos.
  2. Use a different screen­shot program: The lim­it­a­tion outlined above applies only if you wish to produce and edit screen­shots directly with macOS or OS X software. There are also third-party providers that offer free software for making screen­shots on a Mac.
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