Screenshot Keyboard Shortcuts

By Wesley Fryer On September 16, 2018 · · Add Comment

In our visual culture, communicating with images and media is an important element of literacy. Whether you are composing an email, a document to print, an image to share online, or something else, the ability to capture a SCREENSHOT from your computer or mobile device can come in handy. Here are techniques to use built-in screenshot “keyboard shortcuts” on different kinds of computer operating systems and mobile devices.

On a Mac, hold down the COMMAND, CONTROL, and SHIFT keys simultaneously and press 4. This will bring up “cross-hairs” you can use to click and drag over the region of your screen you want to capture. The screenshot will be saved as a PNG image file on your desktop. This article describes more screenshot options on MacOS.

On a Windows10 computer, hold down the WINDOWS key, SHIFT key, and press the “S” key to capture a region of your screen. The captured image is saved to your computer’s clipboard, however, so you need to paste it into the PAINT application or another image application program to save it as an image. If you’re using it with another program, however, like Google Docs or Word, you should be able to simply PASTE the image into your document. This article has more options for using keyboard shortcut combinations on Windows 10, 8 and 7 computers. Alternatively, you can use the built-in “Snipping Tool” application in WindowsOS to capture screenshots. This article explains those steps. The Snipping Tool is my preferred way to capture screenshots on Windows computers.

On a Chromebook, hold down the CONTROL and SHIFT keys while pressing the SWITCH WINDOW key at the top of the keyboard to capture a region of your screen as a screenshot. The file will save to your local downloads folder. This article provide more details and options for Chromebook screenshots.

On an iOS device (iPad / iPhone), press the POWER and HOME buttons at the same time to take a screenshot. Starting in iOS 11, the screenshot is temporarily shown as a small icon in the lower left corner of the screen, and if you tap it you can crop it and directly add annotations. Save the screenshot when finished to your Photo Roll. This support article from Apple provides more details.

Screenshots can be taken on many Android phones by holding down the POWER button and the VOLUME DOWN button, but handset manufacturers have customized this in some cases. This article provides specific steps for taking screenshots on different Android models.