Macintosh- Taking Screen Shots

Hello and welcome to the podcast on taking screenshots on the Macintosh. Nicely, Macintosh has a very simple tool built in. We go into Macintosh hard drives, we go to Applications, and then we search down for Preview. P, p, p Preview, Preview right here. So, Preview, and I’ll close this now. So, we’ve got Preview. Preview’s the application that that was originally built to view PDFs on the Macintosh, but it also has a whole series of screen capture capabilities. And I like to keep Preview in my dock all the time, so I come down here on the Preview icon And, oh, it’s already in my dock. If I said remove from dock. And then I would say keep in dock. It was already there. As soon as I start Preview, I always keep it in the dock. I put all the things I need to use all the time in the dock. And so let’s take a screenshot. I’ll just sort of start a jEdit program. And I’ll say, Take me as a screenshot, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Just this is the window that I want to take a picture of, this window right here. So I go to Preview and I say File, this is in the most logical place. You can either grab a rectangular selection, which you’ll be allowed to draw with your cursor, or a window, or the whole screen when timed. 90% of the time what you really want to do is take a window. You can say, grab window, it, it tells, you, oh, you know you can grab, go over different windows. I can click here, I can click there. And click there. And I just want to capture this window. So, click. I go like that. Now here’s a little weird. This is now an image, okay? And so you can’t click on this stuff. Okay? That’s that. So what you need to do, I’m going to close the original real window now, this is my jEdit. I’m going to Cmd+Q to get rid of the jEdit. And I do not want to save that file. So now I’m in Preview. See, I’m in Preview here. And so, I’ve got this as, as an image. Now the one thing it does, is it always saves it to your desktop. So which gets to be sort of painful as a, after a while. And gives them them long names called snapshot that has the date and stores it in this format called .tiff. So I prefer to switch it to a, you know, non-Apple format. So I want to do a Save As, and I’m going to save this, save this as a .jpeg. And I’d give it a, a better name, called First Image. And it’ll be a .jpeg. And I’m going to store it right on my desktop. So now here we have First Image, okay. And I can click on that and take a look at it. I’ll close this. Click on it. Interestingly, it just comes back up in Preview. So, that’s pretty much it. This would be the file that you would upload, if your job was to do this. I’ll show you a couple other tricks that I like to make my images a little bit better. Now, Preview has a simple tool for cropping. And the way you crop something is you say, you draw a rectangle here on the image, and then you say Tools, Crop. And I’ve gotten rid of all the rest of that image except that which I want. And I’ll say save this as It’s a .jpeg, and I wan’t to save it as .jepg. Tiny. I’ll save it as tiny. And so I now have two images. I got that first image. And I got this tiny image. And there it is. I’ll use Cmd+W to quickly close it. I really like, I mean Apple+W to quickly close it. And so the one thing is, you just, after a while, your snapshots fill up on your desk, and so just keep cleaning them off. And if you were uploading to hand in a screenshot or whatever, this would be the file that you upload. So that’s pretty much all there is. Use the preview command. To take screenshots with the grab and typically it’s grab window. Okay? Thanks.