MacOS has built-in screenshots. Every time you take a screenshot, it makes a sound, which you can turn off, as we’ll see later. There are four basic operations (shortcuts can also be customized, which will be discussed later) :

1. Take a screenshot and save it to the desktop

Cmd + Shift + 3 capture the entire screen and save the screenshot to the desktopCopy the code

After activating the region screenshot, the mouse pointer will look like the one below, then hold and drag

2. Take a screenshot and copy it

In some cases, screenshots are just for temporary use and are not intended to be saved. All we need is:

Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 3 take the entire screen and copy the Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 4 take the area and copy itCopy the code

The above two shortcut keys, after the screenshot, we just need “Cmd” + “V” can paste freely

3. The Touch Bar on the new MacBook

Touch Bar has been added to the new MacBook, and there’s also a shortcut to capture the Touch Bar screen:

Cmd + Shift + 6 capture the Touch Bar display and save to the desktopCopy the code

4. Some advanced operations

A. Intercept a window

One of the more common functions is to capture a window, instead of using the shortcut keys in the capture area and then pulling the entire window, just press the space after “Cmd” + [“Ctrl” +] “Shift” + “4”, and the mouse and window will look like this:

The mouse will change into the camera shape of the red arrow, and the window you want to capture will change to the color of the selected mode. To cancel, press “ESC”. Similarly, adding “Ctrl” to the shortcut will copy a screenshot of the window. If not, it will save the screenshot of this window to the desktop

Some people may ask why the above “selected” mode is such a nan light (Kan) color, but I can set it here, the color is my own, not the default:

B. Resize in real time

There are also some advanced operations that can be performed before opening the zone mode and selecting an area and releasing the mouse button. Here is a brief mention, interested friends can try it themselves:

  • By holding down the “space” and moving the mouse, you can keep the size of the area the same while moving the area
  • By holding down “Shift” and moving the mouse, you can keep the other three sides of the area the same and move one side
  • Hold down “Alt” and move the mouse around to resize the area symmetrically

Personally, I use the space one occasionally, but “Shift” and “Alt”, I don’t really use that much

3. Annotate screenshots

We just need to use the built-in Preview to annotate screenshots

For the screenshot saved to the desktop, first we click on the picture on the desktop, and then directly press “space”. The space bar is a Quick View on macOS, which we’ll cover in a future article. Then just click the arrow in the image below on Open with Preview:

Then click on the toolbox icon that the arrow points to to annotate. MacOS provides us with the following annotation functions: select (circle, rectangle and lasso), brightness selection, brush, geometric annotation (circle, rectangle, arrow, etc.), text, signature, toning and cropping:

Here I have to mention the brightness selection, this function can intelligently select the background according to the brightness. For example, in the screenshot above, click on the brightness selection, then hold down the mouse and drag left or right (or up or down) to see how the selected area changes. After selecting the background, we reverse the selection (“Cmd” + “Shift” + “I”) and “delete” to get this:

4. Time-lapse screenshots and Grab apps

a. Grab

Sometimes we need to delay screenshots, and macOS gives us that, but hides it a little deeper. You can search for it using Alfred or macOS’s built-in Spotlight, just type Grab:

No window opens when you press enter, so you might think you just opened a fake App. In fact, the App itself has no UI. It only displays a Menu on top of the Menu Bar. We can find the options for delay screenshots here:

Click and follow the prompts. The default delay is 10 seconds. Note that a delayed screenshot will capture the entire screen, not the region. We can save the image, and then go to the Preview App and crop it

B. the personalized

The default delay time and save path can be changed. Just open Terminal, type this command and execute:

screencapture -T 10 screenshot1.jpg
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“Screenshot1” is the default file name, you can change it to another file name, or you can add a folder path to it to set the default saving location

5. Configure the screenshot function

A. Disable the prompt tone

Screenshots can be turned off, all you have to do is open System Preferences and select Sound, then just turn the red arrow off:

B. Set shortcut keys

May have a friend feel the system comes with shortcut key good trouble, tell true, habit a few days good. In principle, I don’t recommend that you do it yourself, because if you don’t set the shortcut keys properly, you might have a shortcut conflict in some apps. For example, if you change the screen capture shortcut to “Ctrl” + “C “, you will have to “kill ${pid}” instead of “kill ${pid}”. . Of course, if you’re familiar enough with the keyboard shortcuts, it’s ok to change them, or just revert to default

We can go to “System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts” to set the shortcut keys, go to “Services”, then you can find the shortcut keys to set the screenshot:

Even if you turn it off, all of the shortcuts mentioned in this article will work, as shown above, because they are the default shortcuts. Also, we’ll note that there’s a shortcut to time-lapse screenshots, so if you use this a lot, you might want to attach a shortcut like “Cmd” + “Shift” + “5”, which is easy and easy to remember

C. Set the default path for saving screenshots

Again, I don’t recommend changing this setting, although it won’t fry. For example, if you want to place the screenshot in the myScreenshot folder on your desktop, open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/myScreenshot
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Then, remember to restart the system UI service by executing this command:

killall SystemUiServer
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Later, if you take another screenshot with “Cmd” + “Shift” + “3/4”, the image will be saved in this folder

So much for screenscreens-related shortcuts on macOS, and that’s about all you can think of.