Changing save file format of OS X's Grab utility

Submitted by Chris on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 15:13

One of the things I love about OS X is the bundled Grab utility.

All OS's allow you to capture screen shots, but most only allow you to capture the entire screen, OS X's Grab allow's to capture either the whole screen, a whole window, or allows you to drag a box over the area you wish to capture. It's something I've come to use everyday.

There is one niggling issue though, by default Grab insists on saving the captured images as tiff files. And there seems to be no easy way to change. After a bit of googling though I found it can be changed using the defaults utility in the terminal.

Open up a terminal and enter the command below,

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format

Replacing image_format with your desired image format, eg png, jpg, pdf etc

Success!

IMPORTANT: You have to log out immediately in order for this change to take effect!!

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Did you know that cmd+shift+3

Submitted by eoin (not verified) on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 15:18.

Did you know that cmd+shift+3 and cmd+shift+4 allow you to capture screen and selection also?

For me, these are pngs, I'm not sure if I changed something to make them pngs, but there you have it.