I am a big fan of Mac OS’s built-in screen capture tool. I use it almost every day to to share screen shots with friends or clients. What’s particularly great about it is its ease of use and the flexibility of its keyboard shortcuts
In Leopard, when a screenshot was taken, it was saved to the desktop with a very basic and somewhat useless filename: Picture 1.png, Picture 2.png… This makes it tricky when trying to figure out what screen shot you’re looking for.
Certainly not one of the keystone features in Snow Leopard, the screen capture utility now gives files more intuitive filenames with the date and time at which the shot was taken: Screen shot 2009-08-30 at 11.55.45 AM.png for example.
Let’s recap the different keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots in Snow Leopard:
- ⌘+Shift+3 – Takes full screen shot and saves it to the desktop
- ⌘+Shift+4 – Allows you to capture a selection of your screen and saves it to the desktop
- ⌘+Shift+4 and tap the space bar – Allows you to capture an application window and saves it to the desktop
With any of these keyboard shortcuts, add the Control key and the screenshot is copied to the clipboard.
