How to take a screenshot on a Mac

Every screenshot on a Mac starts with a keyboard shortcut. There are four to know, and they all feed the same capture engine built into macOS, so they work the same on every model.

If you want them all in one place to print or pin up, there is a full Mac screenshot keyboard shortcut reference covering these and the less common ones. The rest of this page walks through each method in turn.

Press Shift-Command-3 and macOS captures everything on screen at once. The shot saves to the Desktop straight away, and a small thumbnail appears in the bottom-right corner for a few seconds. If you are on two displays, this grabs both as separate files.

This is the fastest method when you want the whole picture, but it usually captures more than you need. If you find yourself trimming the result down a lot, drag a region instead, or crop the file afterwards.

Press Shift-Command-4 and the pointer turns into a crosshair. Drag a box over the area you want and release, and macOS captures exactly that rectangle. This is the method most people reach for, because it skips the cropping step.

A few things make it more precise while you drag: hold the Space bar to move the whole selection without resizing it, hold Shift to lock one edge in place, and press Escape to cancel before you let go. If you still need to tidy the frame afterwards, here is how to crop a screenshot on a Mac.

Press Shift-Command-4, then tap the Space bar. The crosshair becomes a camera icon. Move it over any window or open menu, which highlights, and click to capture just that element with its rounded corners and a clean drop shadow. No dragging and no stray background.

This is the tidiest way to shoot an app window or a dropdown menu. If you would rather not have the drop shadow, hold the Option key as you click and macOS captures the window without it.

Press Shift-Command-5 and a small toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen with every capture option as a button. If you came from Windows, this is the Mac equivalent of the Snipping Tool: a panel you click rather than a shortcut you memorize.

From left to right the toolbar lets you:

• Capture the entire screen, a selected window, or a region you drag, the same three modes as the shortcuts above.
• Record video of the whole screen or a selected portion, on top of the still-image capture.
• Set a Timer, so the capture fires 5 or 10 seconds after you click, handy for catching a menu open.
• Open the Options menu, where you change the save location, toggle the corner thumbnail and pick whether the pointer shows.

The toolbar is the place to go when you want to see your choices laid out, change where shots save, or record the screen. For everyday captures the keyboard shortcuts are quicker once they are in your fingers.

Add the Control key to any capture shortcut and the screenshot goes to the clipboard instead of saving a file. So Control-Shift-Command-3 copies the whole screen, and Control-Shift-Command-4 copies a region you drag. Then press Command-V to paste it into a message, a document or a chat.

This is the quick snip-and-paste route when the shot only needs to land in one place and you do not want a file cluttering the Desktop afterwards. The full walkthrough is here: copying and pasting a screenshot on a Mac.

By default screenshots save to the Desktop as PNG files, each named with the date and time it was taken. To find a recent one, look on the Desktop or sort that folder by date. To change where they land, open the Shift-Command-5 toolbar, click Options, and pick a folder under Save to, such as Documents, a custom folder, or even the clipboard.

If your screenshots seem to have vanished, the save location was almost certainly changed at some point. The fix, and the full list of where they can end up, is in where screenshots save on a Mac.

Click the thumbnail that flashes in the corner right after a capture and the shot opens in Markup, where you can crop it, add arrows, text and highlights, or rotate it. For a screenshot you already saved, open it in Preview and click the Markup button for the same tools. The full set of options is in editing and marking up a screenshot on a Mac.

To put a screenshot on paper, open it in Preview and choose File then Print, or press Command-P; the steps for fitting it to the page are in printing a screenshot on a Mac.

No. The shortcuts are identical on a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, an iMac or a Mac mini, because screenshots are a feature of macOS, not of any one model. Shift-Command-3, Shift-Command-4 and Shift-Command-5 do exactly the same thing on every Mac. The only practical difference is the resolution of the resulting image, which follows your display.

One thing worth a pause before you send a screenshot on: a lot of shots catch something that should not travel with them, a customer email, an account number, a name, a token in a console. Markup has no blur or pixelate tool, so the usual fix is a black box drawn on top, but that box is a separate layer and in the wrong format it can be lifted off to reveal what was underneath. Covering is not the same as removing.

To actually hide that detail rather than cover it, you replace the pixels. I built ScrubShot for exactly this: it captures with a shortcut like the built-in tools, then its Scrub tool pixelates a selected area straight into the image so it cannot be recovered, plus Marker, Text and Crop for ordinary edits. Everything happens on your Mac and nothing is uploaded. If you regularly share screens with private data on them, the deeper guide to redacting screenshots on a Mac is the next thing to read.

ScrubShot is a Mac app that captures with a shortcut like the built-ins and adds the one thing Markup is missing: it pixelates sensitive areas into the image so they cannot be recovered, all on-device. Press the shortcut, scrub out the private bits, crop or label the rest, then copy or save. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once, with lifetime updates and no subscription.

Try ScrubShot free →