How to Take a Screenshot on a Mac

The three shortcuts you need

Every Mac screenshot comes down to three key combinations, all built into macOS — no download required. Learn these and you can capture anything on screen in a second.

⌘⇧3 — whole screen

Press ⌘⇧3 (Command-Shift-3) and macOS instantly grabs everything on your display. If you have more than one monitor, you get a separate file for each. A little thumbnail flashes in the bottom-right corner — click it to mark up the shot right away, or ignore it and it saves itself to the Desktop.

This is the closest thing the Mac has to a "Print Screen" — see the FAQ below if you're coming from Windows.

⌘⇧4 — selected area

Press ⌘⇧4 (Command-Shift-4) and the pointer turns into a crosshair. Drag a box around the part of the screen you want and release to capture just that region. A few tricks while you're dragging:

• Hold Space after you start dragging to move the whole selection box.
• Hold Shift to lock one edge and resize in a straight line.
• Hold Option to resize from the center.
• Press Esc to cancel without taking a shot.

⌘⇧4 then Space — a single window

This is the one most people miss. Press ⌘⇧4, then tap the Space bar once. The crosshair becomes a camera icon — move it over any window and it highlights. Click, and macOS captures just that window with a clean drop shadow, perfectly cropped. Hold Option as you click if you'd rather skip the shadow.

⌘⇧5 — the capture toolbar (and screen recording)

Press ⌘⇧5 (Command-Shift-5) to open the full screenshot toolbar at the bottom of the screen. It gives you buttons for all three capture modes — whole screen, window, selection — plus two you can't get any other way:

• Record entire screen and Record selected portion for screen recordings that save as .mov files.
• Options, where you can set a 5- or 10-second timer, choose the save location, and toggle whether the pointer shows.

If you only ever learn one shortcut, make it ⌘⇧5 — every other mode is one click away from here.

Where do the screenshots save?

By default, every screenshot lands on your Desktop, named Screenshot 2026-07-07 at 14.32.51.png. Take a handful in a day and the Desktop fills up fast with near-identical timestamps. You can change the folder from the ⌘⇧5 toolbar under Options → Save to, or copy a shot to the clipboard instead of saving a file by adding Control to the shortcut (e.g. ⌘⌃⇧4).

For the full breakdown — including how to change the default location and the naming — see where Mac screenshots are saved.

Doing more than the basics

The built-in shortcuts are great for grabbing pixels, but the moment you need to do something with the shot — annotate it, name it, stitch a long page together — you hit the limits of what macOS ships with. That's where a dedicated app helps.

ScreenDrafter is a native Mac screenshot app that adds the parts Apple left out:

• Annotate in place — arrows, boxes, and text right where you captured, with a pixel loupe for precision and arrows that snap to text. (More in how to annotate a screenshot on Mac.)
• Auto-name every shot — it reads the image on-device with Apple Vision and suggests a searchable filename like invoice-acme.png instead of a timestamp.
• Scrolling capture — grab a whole long webpage or chat as one tall image, not a dozen tiles.
• Combine shots and pull text out of any capture with one-key OCR (⌘⇧9).

ScreenDrafter's own hotkeys sit right next to the system ones: ⌘⇧2 for an area, ⌘⇧1 for the full screen, ⌘⇧9 to grab text. Everything runs on-device — nothing leaves your Mac.

Related: Where do Mac screenshots save? · How to annotate a screenshot →