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One of the challenges of doing a blog such as this one is getting screenshots of various programs in action, so you’re not just reading plain text. Sometimes you can find appropriate screenshots already provided on a web site, but in other cases you have to try and take them yourself. The Mac has a built-in screen capture facility, but it’s not anything simple like pressing a Print Screen button. Instead, there are actually six options, none of which are exactly intuitive:

• Command-Shift-3 captures the entire screen area and saves it to a file on your desktop
• Command-Control-Shift-3 captures the entire screen area and saves it to the clipboard
• Command-Shift-4 gives you a crosshair cursor. You position it at the starting point, click the left mouse button, and drag to select the area you want to capture. Upon releasing the mouse button, the screen shot will be saved to a file on your desktop.
• BUT if you use Command-Shift-4 and then press the spacebar (instead of using the mouse to define the area), the crosshair changes to a camera. Now use the mouse to drag the camera to an application window you wish to capture, click the left mouse button, and it will capture the entire window to a file on your desktop (including the drop shadow effect).
• Command-Control-Shift-4 operates in the same way as Command-Shift-4 except it copies the screen capture to the clipboard.
• BUT, Command-Control-Shift-4 followed by a press of the spacebar changes the crosshair to a camera, and now operation is the same as if you had pressed Command-Shift-4 followed by the spacebar, except the capture now goes to the clipboard.

And under Leopard only, there are additional possibilities - any of the following keys can be held down while selecting an area (using Command-Shift-4 or Command-Control-Shift-4):

• Space - this locks the size of the selected region and moves it when the mouse moves
• Shift - allows resizing only one edge of the selected region
• Option - resize the selected region with its center as the anchor point

Are you confused yet? There’s lot’s of power there but it’s not exactly easy to remember which command does what, right? And it’s probably a bit more confusing for those of us using PC-style keyboards.

Fortunately there are options for those of us no good at memorization! I’ll just mention three here:

Grab comes with the Mac, but a lot of people may never find it because it’s tucked away, buried in the Applications | Utilities menu. Click on it, and it puts an icon down on the dock, but nothing else obvious happens. The way you use it is that you click on the dock icon, then go up to the top menu bar and use the Grab | Preferences menu to select your preferred pointer type, and whether to enable sound.

But the real action in Grab is at the Capture menu item, which lets you perform four types of captures, as shown at the right.

Each of the menu options opens a small window that lets you do a capture of the type indicated. One thing it won’t do is capture its own windows, which means I can’t show you screenshots of the actual windows, but if you play around with it a bit you’ll get the hang of it. One bit of weirdness is that it doesn’t actually offer to save the capture to a file until you try to close the window, but the thing that makes Grab less than useful is that the images are saved in .tiff format, which means you’ll probably have to use Preview (or another graphics program) to convert the image to a more useable format, such as PNG. On the other hand, Grab does offer the option to take a screen capture with a ten second delay, which could come in handy at times.

Fortunately there are other options available. We happen to like iScreenshot, which simply pops up a small window giving you a shortcut to the same functionality as Command-Shift-4 (with or without the spacebar modifier):

The only drawback of iScreenshot is that it closes itself after each use, so you have to re-run it each time you want to take a screenshot. Still, for one-off screen captures when you can’t remember the doggone keystroke combination, this gives you access to the two most commonly used types.

But, we like software with more power, and free! So in that spirit we present GrabberRaster. According to the author’s site, “GrabberRaster allows you to take repeated screen grabs/captures from almost anything that appears on your Macintosh screen. Grab, resize, and save all in one easy step.”

The instructions for using GrabberRaster are simple:

GrabberRaster is very easy to use.

1. Open GrabberRaster
2. Click the Dots to resize the Grabber.
3. Click the border or use the arrow keys to move the Grabber.
4. See something you like, click Grab. You can also copy frames to the Pasteboard.
5. Default format is JPEG, but you can choose another.

NOTE: At this time, GrabberRaster works only with your primary display (where your Menubar lives)

We found a couple of situations where GrabberRaster would let us capture something that the Mac’s built-in screen grabber would not, such as when trying to capture how a screen looks while holding down a certain key.

Another interesting free program is SnapNDrag, which allows you to take a screenshot by just clicking a button and dragging the resulting screenshot off.

The SnapNDrag web site explains that to email a screenshot, you would drag the screenshot from SnapNDrag to the Mail application. It is that simple. No hard-to-remember key combinations, no file conversion to deal with, no file dialog boxes to navigate, no temporary files to erase later on. It is able to save files in PNG, TIFF, and JPEG formats.

Our final mention in this category is Timed Screenshot. As the name implies, it will take screenshots every few minutes, so you can see what has happened on the screen over a period of time. As the author’s site explains:

When you launch this application it runs in the background till you kill it on the Terminal or you log out. There is a configuration file (plain text) where you can change some settings like the time interval in seconds, the name of the destination folder (which can be an alias) and the quality of the JPEG compressor in percent.

The files are named e.g. “2003-06-05-21-42-48-0.jpg”. Year, month, day, hour, minute, second and ID of the screen. It should work with multiple screens, but it’s not tested.

The application will quit when you shut down your Mac or you log out. To quit at any time you may need the force quit dialog.

Timed Screenshot seems like the type of program that most folks won’t need, but the few who do need it will find it really useful. However it can also be used for dubious purposes (for example, to see if a significant other is carrying on online cybersex conversations with someone at a distance) so we must point out that some uses of this program might not be legal in your jurisdiction, particularly if the computer you install it on isn’t yours. Don’t break the law!

There are many screen capture programs out there, including some we haven’t mentioned in this article. Our theory is that it’s always good to have more than one tool in your toolbox, in case one doesn’t perform quite as expected.

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