Snip Tool For Mac That Offers Edit Tools

There are lots of tools out there for taking screenshots in Windows. However, you may not need to install a third party app. Snipping Tool, included in Windows Vista and later, allows you to take screenshots, as well as edit and annotate them.

We briefly covered the Snipping Tool in our articles about taking screenshots on almost any device and taking screenshots in Windows 10, but we’ll go into more detail here, showing you how to take, save, edit, annotate, and email screenshots, as well as how to customize the settings in the Snipping Tool.

For those of you who don't need high-powered screen capture tools, the basic functionality of Snipping Tool allows you to capture the whole screen, individual windows, or user-specified capture areas. See screenshots, read the latest customer reviews, and compare ratings for Screenshot Snipping Tool. Download this app from Microsoft Store for Windows 10, Windows 10.

To access the Snipping Tool, hit Start, type “snipping tool,” and then click the result. While it’s on the Start menu, you might also consider right-clicking it and choose “Pin to taskbar” or “Pin to Start menu” for easier access in the future.

Before You Start: Set Snipping Tool’s Options

The Snipping Tool window has a few basic features, like taking a new screenshot, canceling a screenshot you’ve started, and taking a delayed screenshot (if you have Windows 10). We’ll go over all those, but first let’s take a look at the settings you can configure by clicking the “Options” button.

The Options window lets you specify how the app behaves and looks.

The “Application” section allows you to change the following settings:

  • Hide instruction text. Hides the text you see below the buttons in the “Snipping Tool” window.
  • Always copy snips to the Clipboard. Copies all screenshots to the Windows clipboard, allowing you to paste them into other applications such as word processors and image editors.
  • Include URL below snips (HTML only). Saves your screenshots as Single File HTML or MHT documents. When you take a screenshot in an Internet Explorer window, the URL of the webpage is included in the screenshot.
  • Prompt to save snips before exiting. When you close the Snipping Tool, the app lets you save any images you have not already saved.
  • Show screen overlay when Snipping Tool is active. By default, while you are taking a screenshot with the Snipping Tool, a white overlay displays on the area that will be captured. If you don’t want this overlay, turn this option off.

The “Selection” section of the Options window lets you change the following settings regarding the color palette in the Snipping Tool:

  • Ink color. Changes the color of the selection border that displays when you create a snip. Select a color from the drop-down list.
  • Show selection ink after snips are captured. When this option is selected, the selection border is shown around the snip after it’s taken, using the ink color you’ve selected.

When you’re done selecting your options, click “OK” to return to the main Snipping Tool window.

Take a Basic Screenshot

To take a screenshot with the Snipping Tool, click the down arrow to the right of the “New” button.

Snip Tool For Mac That Offers Edit Tools For Youtube

You’ll see four choices here:

  • Free-form Snip. This snip lets you draw any shape with your mouse pointer and then takes a screenshot of the selected area.
  • Rectangular Snip. This snip lets you draw a rectangle with your pointer and then takes a screenshot of the rectangular selection.
  • Window Snip. This snip lets you click any open window to take a screenshot of the visible part of the window. This means that if some of the content of the window is offscreen, the offscreen portion will not be captured.
  • Full-screen Snip. This snip lets you take a screenshot of your entire display. If you have multiple monitors, the contents of all your monitors will be captured.

Note that when the menu is open, one of the selections will have a black dot next to it. This indicates the default type of screenshot the Snipping Tool will take if you just click the “New” button instead of opening its drop-down menu. The default selection will always be the last type of screenshot you performed.

If you’ve selected a type of snip and then changed your mind, you can always click the “Cancel” button at any time before actually taking the screenshot to return to the Snipping Tool window.

How to snip in mac

Take a Delayed Screenshot

Until Windows 10, the Snipping Tool remained unchanged since it was introduced in Windows Vista. In Windows 10, the Snipping Tool has all the same features as before, but also adds the ability to take a delayed screenshot. If you click the down arrow next the “Delay” button, you’ll see that you can pick a number between 0 and 5. This number represents how many seconds the Snipping Tool will wait between the time you click “New” and the time the actual screenshot is taken. This gives you time to do things like open menus in a window, since when you click over to the Snipping Tool menus in other windows are likely to close.

Mac Snip Tool Shortcut

Note that just like with the “New” menu, the default choice has a black dot, indicating what time will be used if you just click the “Delay” button instead of using its drop-down menu.

Work with a Screenshot After Capturing It

After you capture any kind of screenshot using the Snipping Tool, it opens in an editing window. The Snipping Tool editor allows you to edit and annotate the screenshot. You also have several new options on the toolbar. The “New” and “Delay” buttons return you to the regular Snipping Tool window so that you can take more screenshots.

Click the “Save” button to save the image to disk, the “Copy” button to copy the image to the Clipboard, or the “Email” button to open a new email message with the image already attached.

To the right of those buttons, you’ll see a few annotation tools. The Pen tool lets you draw on the image in different colors. Click the “Pen” button and then draw whatever you like on the image. To change the color of the Pen, click the down arrow on the “Pen” button and select a color.

On the drop-down menu, you can also choose “Customize” to access more colors, as well as change the thickness and tip style of your pen.

Click the “Highlighter” button to highlight any part of the image with a thick, transparent yellow line. Unfortunately, yellow is the only color the highlighter offers.

And finally, the Eraser tool turns your cursor into an eraser that lets you remove annotations you’ve made. It doesn’t work quite like the eraser you might find in other image editing apps. The Snipping Tool eraser will not erase any part of your original captured screenshot. You also can’t use it to erase portions of your annotations. Click the eraser on any single annotation—like a line you’ve drawn—to erase the whole annotation.

While there are certainly more powerful screenshot and image editing apps available out there, the built in Snipping Tool is pretty handy. This is especially true if you only take the occasional screenshot or find yourself on a system without another image editing app. The Snipping Tool does have somewhat limited features, but it works pretty well for basic screenshots.

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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.

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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.

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:

Mac Version Of Snipping Tool

  • 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

Snip

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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Snip Tool For Mac That Offers Edit Tools In Audacity

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.