Since Window 7, Microsoft has been including an incredibly handy tool with its operating system: Snipping Tool. According to Microsoft, the easiest way to make a copy of something is to take a snapshot of the screen, and that’s exactly what the Snipping Tool allows you to do.
- Capture the menu by following the steps to capture the entire screen, capture a window (the menu is treated like a window), or capture a selected portion of the screen. Markup, share, and save After you take a screenshot, a thumbnail of the screenshot appears briefly in the lower-right corner of your screen.
- Best Snipping Tool for Mac If you want a snipping tool packed with additional features, download Skitch, from the creators of Evernote. Skitch is a free snipping tool app for Macs that also allows you to easily draw arrows, boxes, add text, resize the image, and much more.
- A selectable screen capture:-Some people never require capturing full screen image. I am not using Mac currently and though I have snipping tool in my windows 7 computer, but still I like to edit my pictures printing them first using print screen option and then I paste them to paint.It makes me able to crop up only a selected portion of the captured screen.
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In this article, we describe what the Snipping Tool does and how to use it, and we also list many Snipping Tool Mac alternatives.
Apart from the general options of print screen and snipping tool, you can use various different software to take screen shot. I use ShareX, and Gadwin Print Screen. For more softwares like this visit 43 Best Free Screen Capture Software.
Mac Screenshot Tool
Snipping Tool Under Microscope
The idiom “a picture is worth a thousand words” is especially applicable in today’s digital age. Sharing of images has become incredibly easy, and much of what we do every day takes place on a computer screen. As such, people naturally want to capture what they write, see, create, and do for a myriad of different reasons.
To make screenshot-taking easier for users, Microsoft has created Snipping Tool. To access this tool, select the Start button, type snipping tool in the search box on the taskbar, and then select Snipping Tool from the list of results.
A small window will appear on your screen with four snipping modes:
- Free-form snip: this option allows you to draw a free-form shape around an object and save it as an image file.
- Rectangular snip: this option allows you to drag the cursor around an object to form a rectangle and save it as an image file.
- Window snip: this option allows you to select a window, such as a browser window or dialog box, and save it as an image file.
- Full-screen snip: this option captures the entire screen and saves it as an image file.
Other features of Snipping Tool include the option to set a delay as well as the option to annotate your snips by selecting the Pen or Highlighter buttons. Snipping Tool also supports a number of keyboard shortcuts:
- Alt + M: choose a snipping mode.
- Alt + N: create a new snip in the same mode as the last one.
- Shift + arrow keys: moves the cursor to select a rectangular snip area.
- Alt + D: delays capture by 1-5 seconds.
- Ctrl + C: copies the snip to clipboard.
- Ctrl +: saves the snip.
- Ctrl + PrtScn: captures the entire screen, including the open menu.
As you can see, Snipping Tool is quite powerful for such a small utility that many users are not even aware of. Unfortunately, we have bad news for Windows users who wonder how to use Snipping Tool on Mac: Apple’s operating system doesn’t come with this useful application. But it comes with another screenshot-taking tool, called Grab, and you can think of it as Snipping Tool for Mac.
Snipping Tool for Mac: Grab
Grab is a Mac Snipping Tool alternative that makes it possible to take screenshots of your screen and save them as image files. Just like Snipping Tool for Windows, Grab has several screen-capture modes, and it also supports keyboard shortcuts. Best of all, there’s no need to look for Snipping Tool download for Mac links as Grab comes included with all recent versions of macOS.
To access Grab, you can either:
- Open it from the Utilities folder under Applications.
- Type /Applications/Utilities/Grab.app in Finder.
- Open Launchpad → Other → Grab.
- Open Spotlight and type in Grab.
By default, Grab saves screenshots in the PNG image file format. PNG is the most widely used lossless image compression format on the Internet, and it has a number of advantages over other lossless image compression formats. The problem with the PNG file format is that it produces somewhat large files. Fortunately, Grab allows you to change the default file format to JPG, TIFF, GIF, and PDF formats.
- To change it to JPG, open Terminal and type in “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg” without the quotation marks.
- To change it to TIFF, open Terminal and type in “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tiff” without the quotation marks.
- To change it to GIF, open Terminal and type in “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif” without the quotation marks.
- To change it to PDF, open Terminal and type in “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf” without the quotation marks.
- To change it back to PNG, open Terminal and type in “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png” without the quotation marks.
Okay, so you have Grab open, configured, and ready, but how do you take a picture of your screen or a part of it? You have several options:
- Grab → Capture → Selection: using this option, you can capture a specific region of your screen by dragging a selection box around.
- Shift + Command + A: this shortcut provides an alternative way how to trigger the selection option.
- Grab → Capture → Window: using this option, you can capture a screenshot of a window that you select.
- Shift + Command + W: this shortcut provides an alternative way how to trigger the window-capture option.
- Grap → Capture → Screen: using this option, you can capture a screenshot of your whole screen.
- Command + Z: this shortcut provides an alternative way how to trigger the screen-capture option.
- Grab → Capture → Timed Screen: using this option, you can start a 10-second timer, select a part of your screen, and then take a screenshot.
- Shift + Command + Z: this shortcut provides an alternative way how to trigger the timed screen-capture option.
More Snipping Tool Mac Alternatives
If you would prefer even simpler alternative to Snipping Tool for Mac than Grab, you’ll be pleased to know that macOS comes with not one but three such alternatives:
- Command + Shift + 3: captures a screenshot of your entire screen.
- Command + Shift + 4: turns the cursor into a crosshair, allowing you to select which portion of your screen you would like to capture.
- Command + Shift + 4 + Space: after pressing the space bar, the crosshair turns into a little camera icon, allowing you to move over any open window to take a screenshot of it.
All screenshots taken using these three shortcuts are saved to your desktop. You can also press control to save the screenshots to your clipboard instead, which is useful if you intend to paste them into other applications anyway.
Greenshot
Greenshot is an advanced screenshot-taking tool with built-in OCR capabilities. Just like Snipping Tool for Windows, Greenshot allows you to create screenshots of a selected region, window, or entire screen. It can even capture complete web pages from Internet Explorer without any addons. You can easily annotate, highlight, or obfuscate, the screenshots you take with Greenshot using the application itself and export them in various ways. Greenshot is completely free, open source, and it runs on both macOS and Windows.
LightShot
LightShot is a Mac Snipping Tool alternative and arguably the fastest way how to take a customizable screenshot. The application features a simple and intuitive user interface, which allows you to select any area on your desktop and take its screenshot with just two button-clicks. You can then share your screenshots with others by saving them to your computer or uploading them to LightShot’s servers. LightShot comes with an intuitive yet powerful screenshot editor, so you don’t have to leave the application just to highlight a part of a screenshot or add an annotation.
Snagit
Snagit is more than yet another Snipping Tool for Mac: it’s a full-featured screen-capture software with built-in advanced image editing and screen recording capabilities. The target audience of this powerful application is content creators, educators, business people, and really anyone who wants to add visuals to communicate clearly and be more engaging. With Snagit, you can capture your entire desktop, region, window, or scrolling screen. It takes just a few clicks to make complex edits right within the application, and Snagit’s user interface is so intuitive that using it is a pleasure.
Recover Deleted Screenshots on Mac
Disk Drill
Disk Drill isn’t a Snipping Tool alternative for Mac computers — it’s something even better. With Disk Drill, you can recover all common and not-so-common image file formats, so you’ll never lose any of your screenshots, pictures, videos, music, documents, or any other files since Disk Drill supports the recovery of over 200 file formats.
You can download Disk Drill for free and use it without any expert knowledge, and there are several extra reasons why you should definitely do so because it comes with extra free disk tools that can find duplicates on your hard drive, backup your data, or monitor the health of your hard drive, among many other things.
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Disk Drill has been successfully used to recover important files by countless professional and home users alike, establishing itself as the most accessible and reliable data recovery solutions for macOS and Windows.
Giving a proper instruction is a very big factor to get your work or job done in perfect manner. We basically use written instructions which can be time-consuming, also irritating in between work. The Solution for this that many people are also using is explaining through a Screenshot Or by a picture of work during different sessions in which the work is getting done. Because there is a saying that a picture is worth than thousand words.
Screenshot can be used in each and every field where you are about to give explanation or instruction. It can be your project report, any kind of How to Tutorial etc. A screenshot is basically an image of your computer screen which helps you to understand the process or to get the data more Quicker and easier. However, this task or capturing your screen can be done by different Screen Capturing Tools that basically known as Snipping Tools.
On Windows, you will find this snipping tool pre-installed. This is a very basic tool by which you can snip any particular part of your screen. If you need more features or tired of using the same tool then you are going to see some Best Snipping Tool Alternatives. Or if you are Snagit user which is basically an excellent screen capture tool than this list for you to check some Snagit alternative.
1. SahreX
ShareX is a Free and Open Source Snipping tool. You can Capture your full screen or a particular part of your screen. Also It, not just a screen capturing tool, it is more than that. It has many different and incredible features. ShareX can capture the screen in different capture methods such as web page capture, screen capture, Scrolling capture, text capture. With ShareX you can upload any screenshot/image, text and other types of files to over 80 supported destinations you can choose from. You can capture screen as .gif which is pretty useful because you don’t have to use another tool for converting your screen video recording to gif. After capturing you will have many basic and advance feature like you will get annotation tool so you perfectly do some cropping, highlighting, placing a speech balloon and many other features on your taken Screenshot image file.
Supported in: Windows
2. Greenshot
Greenshot is a light-weight Snipping tool for Windows. With its easy and handy features, you can create screenshots of a selected region, window or fullscreen. You can also capture the scrolling webpage from the browser. With greenshot, you can annotate, highlight any specific part or area of your captured screenshot. After successfully taking and editing the screenshot you can share or upload it on different popular image sharing websites like Flickr or Picasa and others. This tool is very easy to understand and configurable so anyone can use this without any problem.
Supported in: Windows, Mac
3. LightScreen
Lightscreen is one of the lightweight and easy screenshot tool for windows and Linux as well. It enhances your way of capturing screen, taking a screenshot. You can use Hotkeys to easily configure this tool. This works in the background so you can use it anytime by using hotkeys however you will find system tray icon as well to open it. It has such premium features that you can use for snipping your screen. Same as Snipping tool in windows it allows you to snip any part of the screen with some extraordinary editing features. Also, it organizes your previous screenshot by date and time. With LightScreen you can upload your last taken screenshot directly to imgur.com.
Supported in: windows, Linux
4. Shutter
For Linux Users, Shutter is the perfect solution for screen capturing and taking a screenshot. It is open source so you don’t have to worry about purchasing this snipping tool. Shutter doesn’t provide screen video recording like most of the screen capturing tool provides but it is one of the feature-rich screenshot program and best Linux snipping tool for Linux based operating systems. With Shutter, you can modify the taken screenshot and add some effects on it and upload it.
Supported in: Linux
5. LightShot
Lightshot is another fastest and lightweight screen capture tool and Snipping tool. You can take a screenshot of any specific location of your desktop screen within 2 clicks. Lightshot also has similar image search feature with that you can Select any image on your screen and can easily find dozens of similar images. Also, it has such powerful editing tool for editing the image. This is a totally free tool that you can use to take screenshot or screen capture.
Supported in: Windows, Mac
6. Pickpick
This is one of the best screen capture tool for all version of windows. With the same amount of basic screen capturing features, it is a pretty popular tool. It supports multiple monitor environment, auto saving, capturing with cursor etc. You can customize keyboard shortcut to make this more easy to use and fastly accessible. With its in-built image editor feature, you can draw anything on your captured screenshot, crop screenshot, add watermark or resize it. Pickpicks magnifier feature makes it more usable and very attractive. This tool is available in two version, one is paid and one is free. With the free version, you will get almost all features of this tool however you will not get the technical support, auto update feature and advertisement less software environment.
Supported in: Windows 10, 8, 8.1, 7
7. Screenpresso
It provides you incredible features of screen capturing just by pressing the print screen button(PrtScr) on your keyboard. With its built-in image editor, you can make changes on your snipped screen. Along with image capturing it has video screen capture as well to record a video activity of screen as a video file. You can Publish your files to Google Drive, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox and many other. Screenpresso allows you to store or share images and video data to its cloud. To start anytime with screenpresso all you have to do is press the Print Screen Button (PrtScr) and you will see screenpressos amazing panel to assist you regarding image or video capturing. It has Workspaces which gives you access to previous images and video files to manage and use them anytime easily. It comes in three versions one is Free version and other two versions are paid which can be used for Freelancers or small teams or companies.
8. Screen Capturer
Screen Capturer is one of the easy lightweight and free tool for capturing your screen work. By using Screen Capturer you can capture full screen, Capture active or selected window, capture selected area of the screen. You can save your screenshot image file in variety of formats like .png, .gif, .jpg, .bmp and .tiff. Most of the time you will find any kind of free tool comes with the irritating amount of ads in it also some spammers try to defect your system through free software tool. But Screen Capturer snipping tool is totally ads and spam free also very easy to use.
Supported in: Windows
9. Wink
Wink is one of the freeware and cross platform screen capturing or snipping tool. It can capture your screenshot automatically while you use your PC. It is multi-language supported. Also, it has some incredible drag and drops editing features as a free snipping tool. However, Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software but this is also a perfect solution for taking a screenshot and it works amazing. It is available for both Windows and Linux as well.
Supported in: Windows, Linux