Taking Screenshots on the iPhone and in Mac OS X

iPhone

Taking screenshots on an iPhone running software 2.* is easy: Simply press the Sleep / Wake and Home buttons simultaneously to save an image of the screen to your Photo Library.

To download the images from your iPhone, you can use iPhoto, Image Capture, or a similar photo management application, or you can email them to yourself.

Mac

To take screenshots in OS X you can use the ‘Grab‘ application in your ‘/Applications/Utilities‘ folder, the built-in keyboard shortcuts, or the command line screencapture utility.

Like Grab, the screencapture command line utility gives you the option of taking Selection, Window, Screen, or Timed screenshots, but it expands Grab’s functionality somewhat by letting you specify a timer interval, mute the screen capture sound effect, specify where the output image should be saved, etc.

Strangely, the keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots in Mac OS X are a little unintuitive. However, you can find (and change) all the screenshot key combinations in the ‘Keyboard & Mouse‘ preference pane in System Preferences.

By default, the shortcuts are:

⇧⌘-3 (shift-command-3):
Save a picture of the screen as a file on your Desktop.

⌃⇧⌘-3 (control-shift-command-3):
Copy a picture of the screen to the clipboard.

⇧⌘-4 (shift-command-4):
Save a picture of the selected area as a file on your Desktop.

⌃⇧⌘-4 (control-shift-command-4):
Copy a picture of the selected area to the clipboard.

⇧⌘-4, followed by space (shift-command-4, followed by space):
Save a picture of the selected window as a file on your Desktop.

⌃⇧⌘-4, followed by space (control-shift-command-4, followed by space):
Copy a picture of the selected window to the clipboard.

Snapz Pro X by Ambrosia Software allows you to take pictures of the entire screen, specific objects on-screen (windows, dropdowns, etc.), a specific area of the screen, or even record movies with audio from your microphone or your Mac’s sound output. The software sells for $69 (I bought it for cheaper in a MacHeist bundle), but is well worth the money if you need to write documentation or tutorials containing screen outputs.

Related posts:

1. Mac OS X Quick Tip – Taking screenshots from the command line
2. Changing the format of screenshots saved to your Desktop on Mac OS X
3. How to check your iPhone’s UDID from iTunes
4. Enable Emoji Characters on iPhones outside of Japan
5. Inserting special symbols on the iPhone with Glyphboard