If you want control over that – or need to annotate your screenshots, resize them and perform other touch-ups – consider third-party image editors such as Skitch ( free download) or Pixelmator (currently $29.99) Which screenshot format to use?Įach image format has its own drawbacks and advantages so you’ll have to decide for yourself which one to use depending on your specific use cases.Īs a rule of thumb, you’d be typically using TIFF images for print, JPG/PNG for blog posts and web graphics, GIF for lower quality images with less colors and PDF for rich documents with complex layouts such as Pages/Word docs or Keynote presentations. To be perfectly clear, I’m unaware of any Terminal command that would make it possible to specify compression quality. Type or paste the following line into a Terminal window and hit the Return key to execute the command:ĭefaults write type jpg killall SystemUIServer Change the screenshot format to GIFĭefaults write type gif killall SystemUIServer Change the screenshot format to PDFĭefaults write type PDF killall SystemUIServer Change the screenshot format to PNGĭefaults write type png killall SystemUIServer Change the screenshot format to TIFFĭefaults write type tiff killall SystemUIServer About image quality Next, navigate to the Utilities sub-folder and open Terminal.Īlternatively, use Spotlight to launch Terminal.
Open your Applications folder by pressing Shift-⌘-A on the keyboard while the Finder is active.
#Screen snapshot mac how to
How to change the screenshot file format on your Mac With that off my back, using any Terminal command below below will make your screenshots appear in whatever file type you’ve specified. And even if you know about ⌘-Shift-3 and ⌘-Shift-4, our tutorial will teach you some cool new tricks, so do give it a read. You can elect to have macOS save your screenshots in any of these formats.Īnd if you’re unsure how to take screenshots in macOS, we have an easily digestible how-to, just for you. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to change the image format for screenshots taken on your Mac…īefore we get to it, keep in mind macOS recognizes the following graphics formats out of the box: JPG, GIF, PDF, PNG and TIFF. On the downside, PNG screenshots tend to be fairly large in size.Īlthough you can tap Apple’s stock Preview app, or any third-party image editor, to convert PNGs into JPEGs and other image formats, why take extra steps if macOS can do all the heavy lifting for you? PNG is great if you care about image quality: the format uses lossless compression techniques that won’t degrade image quality. By default, macOS saves you screenshots on the desktop, as PNG files.