Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. If you don't like the process of taking
screenshots on your Mac there are ten variations that may work better for you.
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So to take a screenshot on your Mac you may be used to using the default keyboard shortcut
Shift Command 3. That takes a screenshot of your Mac and gives you a floating thumbnail
at the bottom right. You can click on that to mark it up or just wait and it will appear on
your desktop as a file. But perhaps that's not the best workflow for you. There are a
lot of different variations. You just need to know where to go to find screenshot settings
and then some different shortcuts and commands to use while taking a screenshot.
So first let's go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard.
Then go to Keyboard shortcuts. Now there is a section here just for Screenshots. Now you're
going to see five different shortcuts here. Maybe more if you've got a Mac
with a Touch Bar. There at the top is the default, Save picture of screen as a file,
Shift Command 3. But then there is some other variations as well that we're going to look
at. But the one we're going to start with is the last one, Screenshot and Recording Options. This
is the one keyboard shortcut to rule them all. It doesn't just allow you to set the options but you
can actually use this to take screenshots. So if you're really into screenshots and you want
to have all the options available when you do, then Shift Command 5 is the one you want to use..
But first we're going to use it to access the settings. Shift Command 5 brings up
the special screenshot control at the bottom and then you've got the Options Button right
here. Click that and this is where you can highly customize how screenshots are taken.
The first thing we're going to do is get rid of that floating thumbnail. If you don't ever
use it it just takes up some time while it's shows you that thumbnail and waits for you
to click on it. If you'd rather have it just Save the file immediately you just Uncheck it
right there. Now you can see I don't have it selected anymore. Now the next time I
use Shift Command 3 it immediately takes the screenshot and puts it on my Desktop.
Even if you're not a fan of that floating thumbnail you may want to give it a second
look. Let's turn it back On here and see what happens when we capture the screen.
If I click on it it brings up a Preview of the screenshot. Now this might seem like a waste of
time since if you Dismiss it with the X button here at the top left or just click Done then it
just Saves it to the Desktop anyway. But you also have this Trashcan Button here. If you click that
then it doesn't do anything. So this gives you a chance to checkout the screenshot before you save
it. So instead of taking a screenshot, then having to open up the file, check it out, see that maybe
you didn't get it quite right, deleting that file and trying again. You could just do it this way,
click here, and if you don't like it click the Trashcan. Now you're ready to try again. No file
was ever saved. Plus, of course, you also get the ability to markup the screenshot. You get
the ability to Share it directly from here so you could decide, instead of saving it that you want
to send it, say, in a message or in an email. You even get the ability here at the bottom right to
select text that is found in the screenshot. So, for instance, if you take a screenshot of
this and you use the floating thumbnail then you can select the text, Command C to Copy,
and then throw away the screenshot. Then you can past the text into a document.
Now a request I often hear is to not have the screenshot saved to the Desktop. You can actually
save them anywhere. Shift Command 5 and under Options you could see you could have it saved
to the Desktop or Documents. But you can also choose Any Other Location. So I can go, say, to
my Home folder here. I can maybe go into Pictures, maybe create a new folder there called Screenshots
and then choose that. So now when I capture a screenshot it will be
saved into that folder instead of the Desktop.
Now another thing people want to do is to have the screenshot saved to a different location
each time. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do this. But if you look at the options
here one of them is to Save to Preview. What that actually does is open up the screenshot in
Preview. So it is a new document that hasn't been saved yet. So when I take a screenshot
it opens up in Preview and all I need to do now is a quick Command S and I can save it with any
name I want, in any location I want. I can even change the format and the quality of
the jpeg. Or before I Save it I can use the markup tools inside of Preview if I like.
So it works a lot like a floating thumbnail but you can Save it with any name and any location.
Now another thing you may want to do is always copy to the Clipboard instead of saving as a file,
opening in Preview, or doing anything else. If you go into System Settings and then back here
to Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Screenshots, you can see that you can copy a picture of the screen
to the Clipboard by adding the Control key to the keyboard shortcut. So there's already a keyboard
shortcut to do this. But in addition to that if you use Shift Command 5 and then Options you can
set Clipboard as the default location. So now it will save to Clipboard whether you use Shift
Command 3 or Control Shift Command 3. In addition to that if you have the floating
thumbnail turned On and you have it set to Capture To, say, a folder you can Capture,
go to the floating thumbnail and right here, at this point, you can do Command C to Copy and then
you could toss this. Now you could just Paste the screenshot somewhere else into any app you want.
Another thing I like to do is use Shift Command 5 and then switch to
the Capture Selected Portion. Now I can move this around to an area that I want
to capture. But instead of hitting the Capture button there I can just do Command C and that
will Copy it to the Clipboard instead of whatever the default Save location is.
Note this may seem like the same things as Shift Command 4, Capture a Picture of a Selected Area
as a file or Control Shift Command 4, Copy that to the Clipboard. But when you use this,
it's going to ask you for an area and immediately grab it like that. That's what you are stuck
with. But using Shift Command 5 and then this Option here, Capture Selected Portion allows
you to move the area around, adjust the corners and the edges. It will even remember the last
selection as well as long as you have Remember Last Selection turned On. If find this is a
much better way to capture exact portions of the screen than using the regular keyboard shortcut.
Another option that you can set is a Timer. You can set a Timer, say,
for five or ten seconds. The advantage to doing that is sometimes you get a screenshot you can't
get otherwise while you are issuing the keyboard shortcut. For instance, you can capture the menus
up here. Now that I've selected that I can use the capture button here or just click on
the screen to capture the screen. It is going to countdown. I could say bring up a menu like this
and it will grab that menu as part of a screenshot. There are other apps that also
have difficult to grab sections that you can't grab just when you hit Shift Command 3. You
need to be doing something else other than that keyboard shortcut to get it to look just right.
Now this next idea may seem a little strange to a lot of people. I know it did to me at first. But
when you capture a screenshot on an iPhone or iPad where does it go? It goes into your Photos App.
But on the Mac it doesn't. It is saved as a file. Now I prefer the Mac way of doing things. I wish
there was a way on the iPhone and iPad to have it saved as a file instead of going to the Photos
App. But there are some people that like that method and want to do it on the Mac as well.
There's no setting to Save the screenshot to the Photos App. But you can choose Other Location and
select a folder. Like we selected the Screenshot's Folder. Let's create yet another folder here
and call this Screenshots to Photos and set it as the default location. Now we're going to run
Automator. Automator has largely been replaced by Shortcuts today on Macs but it still does
some things that shortcuts does not. One of those is to create a Folder Action. So we're going to
create a Folder Action here and then we're going to choose the Folder Action right here and choose
that folder that we just created, Screenshots to Photos. Then we're going to just put one
Action in here. We're going to look in the Photos Category here and there's one called Import files
into Photos. We'll drag that over here to add it. You can import without adding to an album
or add to an existing top level album. We're going to Save and we'll call this Screenshots
to Photos. Now this will run automatically anytime, anything goes into Screenshots to Photos.
Since we have Screenshots set to go here by default this should make new screenshots go into
the Photos App. So I'm going to take a screenshot of this screen right here. There's the floating
thumbnail. We can take a look at it. It looks fine. Done. It goes into the folder like that
and you could see the Folder Action triggers automatically. You can see the first time it
runs it's actually going to ask for permission. We'll give it permission. It runs. So now if
we look in the Photos App and we look at our most recent photo, sure enough, there it is.
So I hope you found these techniques useful. Thanks for watching.