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How do I change the format of a Mac screen capture?

About 6 months ago I was playing around on my iBook G4 and I found the option to change the format that Apple+Shift+4 saves in. For some odd reason I choose JPG-2000 (picture.jp2). Of course, now I can't find how to change it back!

Dave's Answer:

It's not hard to change the format of a screen capture / screenshot made with the native Mac OS X capture utility, but you do have to be comfortable opening up your Terminal.app and typing in a command on the command line. Y'know, the Unix underneath the snazzy graphical interface. :-)

Start by going to Applications --> Utilities --> Terminal.app and launching it. You'll see something like this:

At this point you want to decide which format you'd like. Here are your choices:

BMP (Windows bitmap)
GIF
JPEG 2000 (what you chose)
JPEG
PDF
PICT
PNG
PSD
SGI
TGA
TIFF

Quite a few choices, as you can see!

Pick the one you like -- I recommend PNG, which stands for progressive network graphic, as the best of both GIF and JPEG formats -- and then type in the following command exactly as shown:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format

For example, if you did decide to use PNG format, you'd type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

Type that in and you won't see anything change, but next time you take a screen shot (as documented here: how to get a screen capture on Mac OS X) you'll have the image saved in the format you seek.

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Categorized: Mac OS X Help (Article 7585)
Tagged: mac os x, screen capture, screen grab, screenshot
Previous: How do I take a screenshot on my Mac?
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Comments

I use this for the images I post on my blog:

http://wyliemoney.blogspot.com/

Is png the best for quick images for web sites?

Thanks!

Posted by: wylie at September 17, 2007 11:44 AM

It doesn't work in new macs. It could only work in useless antiques computers

Posted by: Grab at September 20, 2009 11:19 AM

didn't work for me

Posted by: bill at December 21, 2009 3:29 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!