Take Screenshots on Mac OS without Keyboard

As there is no Print Screen button on a Mac Keyboard as you may find on Windows, you can either use Keyboard shortcuts or make use of the available Menu Options that we can use to capture screens.

Here is how you can take a screenshot on a Mac (like what we call print screen on Windows) without Keyboard

1. Preview App: If you do not want to use keyboard key combinations to take a screenshot (print-screen/screen capture) there is an option available using Preview App

1. Goto Spotlight Search and look for Preview App and open it,
2. Now you must see that Preview Menu bar is loaded
3. Now goto File -> Take Screenshot

There are 3 options available,

1. From Selection

   This will make the cursor pointer as a cross-wire, when you click and drag a portion of the window gets selected and will be displayed with Preview App.

2. From Window..

   When you select this option, your mouse pointer turns into a Camera icon and it highlights the selectable windows that are available on the screen, when you click, the selected window is captured and displayed with Preview App.

3. From Entire Screen

   When you select this option, you would see that a message is popped up at the center of the screen saying "Countdown to Screenshot has started" and after few seconds the entire window image is taken displayed with the Preview App.

⛏️ Advantage of taking a Screenshot with preview App.

There are a few advantages of taking a Screen Shot using the Preview App,

• It lets you edit the image on a go, before being saved. It lets you do some basic editing on the image like rotation, cropping, adding text, and so on ..
• You can save the image in formats other them Png like JPEG, JPEG-2000, OpenEXR, PDF, and TIFF.

2. Grab App: There is another application that lets you take screenshots, you may find it under /Applications/Utilities/

a. Open Grab (type Grab in Spotlight search)

b. Now on the Grab menu, select Capture, you get the following options,

• Section
• Window
• Screen
• Time Section

✌️This works on all Mac computers: iMac's, Mac Mini, Macbook Air's or Pros running macOS (Catalina, Mojave, Big Sur)

Have Questions? Post them here!