How to Take Screenshots on a Mac

Taking a screenshot may seem simple enough, but odds are there’s an even easier way to capture what’s on your screen. I say this as someone who has happily been using command+shift+4 for years, only to have my mind blown when we started making this video.

Let’s get the basics out of the way: To take a screenshot of your entire screen on a Mac, hold down command, shift, and 3 simultaneously. To select a specific area of the screen, hold down command+shift+4 and your cursor will turn into a little drawing tool that you can drag to form a box around whatever you want to capture.

But you didn’t come here to memorize a bunch of new shortcuts, so just use command+shift+5, which will bring up a menu with all your other screenshot options. From this menu, you can do all the functions already described, or also choose to screenshot a specific window, record your screen, or decide where the screenshots will be saved. You can even send them directly to your clipboard to paste anywhere you like.

Bonus tips: If you press command+shift+4 and then hit the spacebar, you can select which open window you’d like to screenshot. Hold down the option key before taking the screenshot to get rid of the drop shadow. Finally, hold down command+control+shift+4 to send your screenshot straight to the clipboard.

To see all these methods in action, check out the video above.