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.
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.
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.
Microsoft Snipping Tool For Mac Free Download
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:
- 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
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.
Your Companion for Deleted Files Recovery
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.
This generation is known as the internet generation as people make use of it to communicate with other in every means. Taking a screenshot is one among such communication and people widely make use of snipping tool to grab a screenshot from any of their devices. These snipping tools software would help you to grab the things that you need to share from your on screen and it will eventually capture them as they are.
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One can later on share these captured screens to others using chat messengers or email client services. The following are some of the snipping tools that are mostly used by many people on the internet.
Snipping Tool Plus
This software can be used to capture a particular region from your screen by following three simple steps. All you need to do is to press the hot key on your keyboard and then select the region that you want to capture from your screen. Then upload it and get the link to download them.
Snagit
Snagit is a type of premium snipping tool that helps their users to capture their on screen that runs on any operating system. The users can also record their screen and play them in the form of video. You can also edit the screenshot after being captured from any of your device.
Lightshot
This software can be used to make a fast screenshot from a selected area on your screen. The application allows their users to grab a screenshot by following two simple button clicks using their mouse. The screenshots can be shared using internet to others as the images and videos get uploaded to the servers.
Ember
This screen capture software has been developed specially for the mac users and it has many effects attached to them. The users can add frames, drop shadows, watermarks, motion blur, mosaic and even control the overall brightness of their screenshots by using them on their computer.
Ducklink
The Ducklink software lets their users to capture screenshots and share them via email, Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Evernote, Box, Twitter and also on Facebook. The advanced settings in this software let you to easily customize all the hot keys that can be used to capture a screenshot.
TechSmith
The Techsmith software will help you to capture whatever you see on your screen. All you need to do is to select the regions that you need to capture in the form of screenshots. The users can also record their screen by selecting the region that they want to get recorded. This can be used for making a simple and effective tutorial.
Snip
The users of this software can click and drag in order to capture any part of the window. You can also annotate the screenshots by drawing a snip above them with the help of digital ink. Comments can be added to such snip regions. Later on, paste the snip and share the URL with others using your internet.
Apowersoft
This full-fledged kind of screenshot application makes it very simple to grab a screenshot out of anything that gets displayed on your Mac. The software comes in handy and it is very much free from bugs. This software will enable their users to communicate more efficiently with their co-workers and with their family.
PDF Snipping Tool
As the name says, this software lets their users to take a screenshot from any kind of PDF file. The users can take screenshots in the form of rectangular shape or even the entire page. The snips can also be cut and pasted with other windows by making use of the mouse. The images will get saved according to the image format that the user selects on screen.
Other Snipping Tools software for different platforms
The snipping tool software works both automatically and manually. The users of this software can easily customize them according to their own needs. This kind of software is highly used in many different platforms and they are as follows.
Skitch for Mac users
This snipping tool software for Mac users has the most simple user interface and it helps their users to edit their screenshots. One can add certain shapes and even texts to the image that has been captured in the form of screenshots. The images can also be shared online using the internet.
Most Popular Snipping Tools Software
Best Snipping Tool For Mac
PicPick
This screen capture tool is a user friendly one and it has the feature to create and edit a screenshot. This software is mostly suitable for graphic designers, software developers and for home users. The users can even color up their screenshots by making use of the color picker tool from this software.
PicPick is the most popular and highly recommended snipping tools software from many people from all around the world. This is because; the software itself has many varieties of graphic design accessories that include color picker, pixel ruler, color palette, protractor, magnifier, crosshair and a whiteboard. These accessories will enhance your screenshots in many ways.
What is Snipping Tools Software?
The Snipping Tools Software has been designed to help the computer users to take a picture of their on screen and share them with others. This type of taking picture on screen is named as screenshots and it has now become the most popular thing in this internet generation.
If you have some found some needed information on screen and wanted to show them to your co-workers, then you can make use of the snipping tools software to capture them as it is and share it with them.
Snipping Tool Equivalent On Mac
This software is widely available for all the operating systems and many corporate companies do have snipping tool software installed on every single computer in their work space.
How to install Snipping Tool Software?
Snipping Tool For Mac Free Download
In order to make use of the snipping tool software, one must be downloading them from the official web pages on the internet. The users can also sign up to the software using their account information while installing them to the computer. The installation time is short and one can explore many new things once it gets completely installed to their computers.
The Snipping Tools Software is highly suitable for every user who makes use of the internet. If you are working in a corporate company, then you would be looking out for many documents and you tend to share them with others. At this point, you can find it difficult to save the documents and share them.
This is where the snipping tools software helps you by grabbing a screenshot of the document and you can easily share the screenshot with your co-workers in no time. The software not only saves your time and energy, it also lets you to communicate more effectively with others in your working space.
Snipping Tool For Mac Free Download
If you are a student, then you can use this software to capture the entire needed thesis or other information from the web pages, without the need to copy and save them in the form of word document.