Screen Capture on Mac

Unlike the PC, the Mac has no PrtScreen button. To capture a screen, use cmd-shift-4 to take screenshots and save to disk, and cmd-ctrl-shift-4 to take screenshots and copy to clipboard.

The captured screen will be on the desktop named Picture 1.pdf, Picture 2.pdf and so on. Some blogs say the default filetype is PNG, but not on my Mac.

To change default filetype to some other filetype, launch Terminal, and depending on what file type you want outputted, type (or copy and paste) the appropriate line below followed by return:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tif

Quit Terminal, log out of your account and log in for the change to take effect right away. To revert to the default png format, type 'defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png' as shown above (no single quotes), or delete the com.apple.screencapture plist file in your user preferences folder (no need to restart).