Is there something like the Windows Snipping Tool for OSX?

For those, who don't know about the tool, it's an easy to use software to take snapshot of any portion of screen, and is really useful in various situations.

Snipping Tool is a nifty utility that allows you to take screenshots of any part on Windows computer screen. It offers four screenshot modes for you: Free-form snip, Rectangular snip, Window snip and Full-screen snip. To help users take snapshots without installing third-party tools Microsoft first introduced Snipping tool with Windows Vista and the same feature exists in Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 and the latest Windows 10 as well. Snipping tool is only included with Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista. If you can not find it, you can alternatively download the free tool Capture Screenshot lite which looks the same and works pretty much the same. Actually there are many Snipping Tool alternative on Mac, such as the built-in Grab for Mac, it can be used to take screenshots on Mac, but it can automatically save screenshot in TIFF format. You need to use the 'Preview' app to change the format. So for this exact purpose, we need a tool that just works like Windows Free Snipping Tool plus including the support for uploading snips to FTP or to storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, S3.

gentmattAtul GoyalAtul Goyal

8 Answers

There is now a blog entry about Taking Screenshots in a Snap.

It's built into Mac OS.

• ⌘+⇧+3 captures the whole screen
• ⌘+⇧+4 captures a custom rectangle (click and drag over the screen region you want to capture)
• ⌘+⇧+4 then space captures a specific window (move the mouse cursor over the desired window, then click)

Press esc to cancel.

Screenshots are saved onto your Desktop and timestamped.

Holding control in addition to any of the sequences above causes the image to be copied instead of saved to the desktop.

By default the image format is png. However, you can change the format by typing in the Terminal:

Where image_format is one of jpg, tiff, pdf, png, bmp or pict (among others). If you omit the second line, you will need to log out and in again for the change to take effect.

The settings for the shortcuts in the system preferences are located at:
System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screen Shots

The MacOS X application that enables screenshots is called Grab. It is located at /Applications/Utilities/Grab.app

gentmatt

Mac Snipping Tool

gentmatt

If you don't want to remember the shortcut keys, you can also use the built-in Preview app.

Just launch Preview, then from the menu, select File, Take Screen Shot, then choose

• From Selection - you will get a crosshair to drag
• From Window - you will get to choose which window to grab
• From Entire Screen - it will give a countdown first, so that you can get back to whatever app you want to take a picture of

It will then display the screenshot in Preview, and you can save, copy, paste, crop, etc. from there.

Macworld magazine's senior editor Dan Frakes just posted a very good short video tutorial (with show transcript) about the screenshot features of Mac OS X. This includes how to use the Grab app from the Utilities folder. The video is at: http://www.macworld.com/article/164123/2011/12/mac_os_x_screenshot_secrets.html.
His show description:'Mac OS X makes it easy to take screenshots—images of your screen or objects on it. But even veteran Mac users are often unaware of the many options available for getting the perfect screenshot. Here's a quick look at these underused options.'

If you also need editing capabilities (e.g. like Windows Paint or however it's called these days), Skitch is a good add-on (and it's free).

nohillside♦nohillside

Easycrop, or start with the insanely great (and free) SnapNDrag, from Yellow Mug — http://www.yellowmug.com/

You may like Snip, I used it for a while and I found it fantastic. You can download it from Mac App Store for free

Of course, the most convenient way to snapshot on Mac is by pressing keyboard shortcuts, however, this traditional method lacks additional features like making annotations, uploading images online for sharing, etc. For this purposes, you can make use of professional Mac screenshot tools that features the same function as Snipping Tool.

Grab - A built-in screenshot tool on Mac that enables you to capture anything you see on screen.

Skitch - Easy tool that allows for capturing, annotating and sharing screenshots / images.

Jing - An effective screen capturing program that works for recording screen and taking screenshot.

grg♦

Keyboard Maestro can drive Preview to behave exactly like snipping tool

F13 (in the same place as PrintScreen on Windows)

Open Preview.app

Snip Function On Mac

Select menu File/Take Screen Shot/From Selection

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protected by Community♦Sep 12 '15 at 14:45

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Recommended Snipping Tools for Windows and Mac

While the free apps above only capture screenshots, SnagIt can also capture video, and it comes with more robust tools for editing both photos and videos. SnagIt can also make animated GIFs and record audio, and you get a variety of annotation tools. You can try it for free for 15 days, and if you own an older version, you get a 50% upgrade discount.

Greenshot (Windows only) is pretty similar to Lightshot, but it has better cloud support. During installation, you can install plug-ins for Dropbox, Photobucket, Flickr, and others. You can also automate attachment to emails, export to Microsoft Office apps, and highlight or mask parts of the image without having to open an image editor.

Snip It For Mac

Lightshot is a free tool you can set to pop up whenever you press the print screen key (Shift-Command-4 on Macs), or it can make print screen automatically create an image file. Lightshot will save either a JPEG or a PNG file, and its image quality slider has 100 increments. Unfortunately, you don't get a preview of what the different slider ranges look like, but most tools of this type have no increments to begin with.