One of little known utilities in Mac OS X is Grab. This application can do what most of the other “professional” screenshot applications charge for, including selection, window, screen, and timed screenshots. With a few mouse clicks, you will be able to capture and export a screenshot to anywhere on your Mac. The advantage to using Grab over the built-in screen capture shortcuts in OS X is that you won’t clutter up your Desktop with images. Instead, Grab will open up a preview window where you can decide whether or not you want to save the image.

Capturing Screenshots with Grab

To capture a screenshot with Grab, you’ll first need to open up the application (located in /Applications/Utilities). Once you have it opened, you’ll notice the user interface is rather lacking. Most of the work in this application will be done using the menubar menus.

To capture the screen, go to the Capture menu. There are four different screen capture modes:

1. Selection - Lets you select (with your mouse cursor) the section of the screen you wish to capture. This tool also gives you pixel coordinate information for precise on-screen pixel measurements.

2. Window - Window, as the name implies, lets you capture an entire window’s contents.  This is great for showing someone how to do something in an application, without exposing other windows on your computer.

3. Screen -  This capture mode will capture the entire screen of your Mac desktop.

4. Timed - The Timed capture mode will wait 10 seconds before capturing the entire screen of your Mac. This tool is useful when you need to show an action that will happen after you click something.

Saving Screenshots with Grab

After you take a screenshot using any of the above methods, a new window will open containing a preview of your screenshot. To save the screenshot as an image file to your Mac, go to File > Save. The file will then be saved out as a .tiff image to the location you specified.

Image Inspector

When the screenshot preview window is opened, you can go to Edit > Inspector (or press Command + 1) to bring up the “Image Inspector.” This tool lets you see at a glance the width and height of the image and the bit depth.

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