The Mac offers many options for taking screenshots without installing third-party apps. You can take a Mac screenshot that shows the entire screen, get a clean image of a specific window, or select specific areas to capture. There’s also a built-in way to take a video of your Mac screen (and even record a voiceover for your screen recording using your microphone, headset or AirPods.)
We’ll show you various ways to take a Mac screenshot so you can decide what’s best for your needs.
Let’s face it: The Mac’s built-in Markup tool for screenshots is anything but heroic. If you want something a bit beefier and easier to use, try Markup Hero.
This screenshot and annotation tool will make it easier to capture what’s on your computer screen and mark it up for sharing with friends, tech support geeks or what have you. And for a limited time, you can get three-year and five-year Superhero Plans on sale for $59 (regularly $144) and $79 (regularly $240) respectively.
On the iPhone and iPad, you can capture any image you see just by grabbing a screenshot. Pretty much everyone knows the power+home button, or power+volume-up button combo that snaps a screenshot and saves it to your photo library. You can even crop the image before saving it, to remove surrounding distractions. But what about video? Or music? Is it possible to take a “screenshot” of the music playing on your iPhone? Find out how to play music while recording video iPhone with this helpful guide. Or capture a YouTube video? Yes it is. In fact, you can even “screenshot” a video, and then extract the music from within. Here’s how: with screen recording.
Taking a full-screen screenshot on a modern Mac or iPhone is just a matter of tapping a couple of buttons. But things used to be a whole lot more challenging, as longstanding Apple employee Chris Espinosa recently shared on Twitter.
Kids (and “how to” article writers) today don’t know how good they’ve got it!
Instant Markup is one of the best parts of the iOS screenshot tool, and in iOS 13 and iPadOS it’s better than ever. The tools are more flexible, you get more colors, and it even remembers your selections for next time. It still doesn’t offer all the advanced features of a markup app like Annotable (you can’t pixelate parts of the image, for example), but it’s more than good enough for most uses.
Let’s see what’s new in the iOS 13 screenshot markup tool.
Like skinning a cat, there’s more than one way to take a screenshot on the iPhone and iPad. And with the launch of iPadOS 13, there’s now one more way to snap a picture of your screen on the iPad.
Let’s check out all the ways to take a screenshot on an iPad running iOS 13.
The screenshot tool gets a radical makeover in iOS 13, and I’m not even talking about the fancy new toolbar for Apple Pencil markup. You can take advantage of two cool new features when you snap a screenshot in the upcoming version of iOS.
One, you can capture the entirety of a web page — not just what you can see on the screen right now, but all of it, from top to bottom, as if you’d stitched together lots of screenshots. Two, you can save these all-page screenshots as PDFs with active, selectable text and links.
Here’s how to make the most out of PDF screenshots in iOS 13.
iPadOS 13 soups up its screenshot tool with the ability to capture an entire webpage as a PDF. That means it doesn’t just grab what you can see on the screen right now. If you’re viewing a webpage that’s really, really long, it will capture the whole thing, and turn it into a very tall PDF.
You can also mark up the resulting PDF before you save it to the Files app. This is a fantastic way to save a webpage, especially when you combine it with Reader View to remove the ads, sidebars and other junk first.
Let’s see how to use it.
As a Mac user, you already know how to take a quick screenshot with the ⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4 shortcuts. But did you know that you can also capture a video recording of your screen? If you’re running macOS Mojave, making a Mac screen recording proves as easy as hitting a shortcut, just like grabbing a screenshot. Older Macs can do it, too, albeit with a little more futzing.
Apple will finally bring a dark mode to iOS with a major update this fall. Leaked screenshots of iOS 13 show us exactly what it will look like. We also get our first glimpse of a redesigned Reminders app.
I got sick of having to tap a zillion buttons just to iMessage a photo to somebody, so I made a shortcut that lets me tap an icon on my Home screen, and sends my latest photo automatically to a preselected friend.
That’s it. You tap it, and the shortcut grabs the last photo you shot, and sends it. If that sounds like something you want, check it out.
Today we’re going to make an iPhone frame shortcut that takes your most-recent iPhone screenshot, and wraps it in a device beautiful frame. The frame will be the body of the iPhone, so it’ll look just like the iPhone pictures Apple uses on its site. This shortcut requires a little bit of setup (you have to copy some images into a folder in iCloud Drive), but after that it runs with a single tap.
You almost certainly know the shortcuts for snapping quick screenshots on your Mac. It’s ⇧⌘3 to capture the entire screen, and ⇧⌘4 to get a crosshairs cursor to select a section of the screen.
Now, there’s a new screenshot shortcut in town: ⇧⌘5. And boy is this fella fancy. If this were a western movie, ⇧⌘5 would be the young upstart blowing into town with a couple of Uzis and a pair of Kevlar chaps1. Let’s check out Mojave screenshots.
You already know how to take a screenshot on the Mac: You hit either ⌘⇧3 (to capture the entire Mac screen) or ⌘⇧4 (to bring up a crosshairs to select a part of the screen). But did you know that there’s a third option that will snap a fancy picture of a single app window, complete with a classy drop shadow and a clean white background?
Prepare yourself for screenshot glory!
iOS 11 added screen recording to the iPhone and iPad, letting you make movies from whatever is running on then screen. I use it to make video clips for how-tos, or to capture video and then create animated GIFs. But did you know that you can also use screen recording to copy a YouTube video? Or to make a screencast complete with a live voiceover? Here’s how.
On your Mac, screenshots are pretty automatic. You hit the shortcut of your choice, and the resulting picture is saved to your desktop as a PNG image file. But what if you want a JPG? We’ve already covered that. How about saving the image to somewhere other than your desktop. Like iCloud maybe? Today we’ll see how to change the Mac’s default screenshot location to an iCloud folder.
Did you ever snap a photo of a magazine page, or capture a screenshot of text, and wish you could just copy and paste it like any normal text? Maybe it’s a photo of a recipe from a paper book, and you’d like to be able to search for it in future? The good news is that you can easily extract the text from a photo or screenshot, right there on your iPhone.
The even better news is that we’re going to learn how to do it right now.
Apple wants to make sure iPad users know how to work with two apps at once, and also how an Apple Pencil can mark up screenshots. A couple of new videos walk users through each of these quickly and simply.
The video are likely timed to benefit people buying the new iPad, the first budget iOS tablet that supports the Apple Pencil.
If you like Instant Markup on iOS, then you’re going to love ShotBox. It’s a free app, available from the Mac App Store, that automatically pops up a panel of markup tools whenever you take a screenshot. It’s almost exactly like the Instant Markup tools built into iOS 11.
iOS 11 has added some great new features to the humble screenshot tool. You can quickly view a new screenshot without a trip to the Photos app first, and you can edit and mark it up before saving it. By adding some powerful pro-level features to screenshot markup, Apple has –somewhat ironically — made them way more useful and accessible for everyone.
Pick up any iPhone (or iPad), press the sleep/wake button and the home button together, and you’ll snap a screenshot. That screenshot will be saved to your camera roll. That’s not possible with the iPhone X, because it has no home button. Fear not, though, because there is an alternative. Better still, Apple has added yet another button-finagling shortcut to the iPhone X — one to disable Face ID.
Yesterday, we saw how to set the default screenshot format on your Mac to JPEG instead of PNG, in order to make your screenshots more universally usable. You can’t change the default screenshot file type on iOS, so today we’re going to look at the next best option — converting PNG to JPEG as easily and quickly as possible.
Thanks to the new screen-recording feature in iOS 11, you can now make a video of whatever you’re doing on your iDevice, and share it. I use this for how-tos (although ironically, not this one), developers can use it to make videos of their apps for the App Atore (the new iOS 11 App Store features videos quite prominently), and regular folks can use it to record a snippet of a YouTube video or suchlike. But what if you prefer to share your optimized video as a huge, bandwidth-hogging GIF instead?
Well, iOS has you covered there, too, but you’ll need to download Apple’s free Workflow app.
I take a lot of screenshots on my Mac. This typically results in my desktop being cluttered with files I don’t really need to be there once I’m done with them.
That’s why I decided to change the location where my Mac screenshots are stored. My desktop is now clean and I still have quick access via a folder on my desktop. Here’s how you can do the same.
Picatext is a Mac app that performs OCR on your screenshots. That’s it, but as you’ll see, “that” is pretty damn handy.