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,
Written by
Dave Taylor)
Tagged:
mac os x, screen capture, screen grab, screenshot
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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!