Screenshots in OS X. 2 Different Ways.

While writing this blog, I often times will need to take pictures of what I'm doing to demonstrate how something needs to be done.  These pictures — known as screenshots — are easy to take, although the process for taking them is not obvious in any way.  In OS X,  there are two different built-in ways to take screenshots.


The first is the program Grab, which can be found in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder on the root of your hard drive.

Grab does nothing more than attempt to "grab" what's happening on the screen.  Note that Grab only works for still pictures.  If you want to record motion, you'll have to use Quicktime, which I'll go over in a future blog post.


Once you open Grab, it just sits there waiting for you to tell it what to do.  Go over to the Capture menu item, and select it.  You'll see the following:

The capture menu of Grab.

There are 4 different kinds of screenshots you can take with Grab.  The first is "Selection," which allows you to select a portion of the screen to capture.  Once you have made your selection, Grab instantly takes the picture as soon as you release the mouse button.  Use this option if only need to select a small section of the screen.  The "Window" menu item allows you to capture entire windows, and nothing else.  "Screen" takes a picture of the entire screen (everything that's currently visible), and "Timed Screen" waits ten seconds to take a picture of the entire screen.  Timed Screen is useful if you need to get something ready before taking the screenshot, as in the screenshot above.  I needed to get a picture of the Capture menu, but needed to have it open to take a picture of it.  Timed Screen helped me do that.


The other way of taking screenshots in OS X doesn't require you to open any program.  Press Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot of the whole screen (exactly like "Screen" above), and Command-Shift-4 to take a screenshot of just a selection ("Selection").  When you do Command-Shift-4, your cursor will turn into crosshairs, and you can then select whatever portion of the screen you want to capture.  A neat trick here, is that after you press Command-Shift-4, if you then press the Spacebar, your cursor will turn into a camera.  This is the equivalent of the "Window" option above.


There you have it: screenshots in OS X.  Simple.