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Being the Apple guru among my friends and coworkers, I often get asked how to take a screenshot on Macs and iPhones. And I can understand why that’s such a popular feature. Screenshots have so many applications. My personal favorite is taking a screenshot of my friends’ Mac desktop, setting it as the desktop background, and hiding the dock and all the icons. It really screws with their heads when they can’t click on anything. Hilarious!

Mac

There are several ways to take screenshots in OS X. Use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Command-Shift-3. This takes a shot of your screen in its present state and saves the image as a PNG to your desktop.
• Command-Shift-4 + select an area. * This allows you to select a specific area that you want captured off your screen. The image is saved as a PNG to your desktop.
• Command-Shift-4 + space + select a window. This will capture only the window that you select, nothing else. Again, the image is saved as a PNG to your desktop.
• Command-Control-Shift-3. This takes a shot of your screen, but copies it to the clipboard.
• Command-Control-Shift-4 + select an area. * This allows you to select an area of your screen to copy to your clipboard
• Command-Control-Shift-4 + space + select a window. This will capture only the selected window and copies the image to your clipboard.

* In OS X Leopard, Apple added the ability to manipulate the selected area while holding down Command-Shift-4 or Command-Control-Shift-4 before saving or copying.

• Space. This locks the size of the selection and allows you to move it around with the mouse.
• Shift. This allows you to resize an edge of the selection.
• Option. This allows you to resize the selection with its center acting as an anchor point

iPhone & iPod Touch

To take a screenshot and save it to your Saved Photos folder, press the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons at the same time and release. The screen will flash white momentarily. If it doesn’t, try again.

Note

Apple Forever does not take responsibility for mental damage caused by screenshots being used as desktop backgrounds. Enjoy responsibly

About The Author

Stuart Wagner

Stuart is a professional web designer, developer, and photographer living in Ithaca, NY, USA. He enjoys web and graphic design, and blogging about Apple on his Mac. When he is not behind a computer screen, you will find Stuart around town or in the country, taking pictures of anything interesting he can find. He also travels frequently, either throughout the United States, or to Europe. For updates on his travel, and for general entertainment, follow Stuart on Twitter (@stuartwagner)