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Changing default image type on mac screen capture

By fpeter - Mar. 27, 2008

I use cmd-shift-4 to take screenshots on the mac and save to disk, and cmd-ctrl-shift-4 to take screenshots and copy to clipboard.

When I want to put these into, say, mail.app, I notice that the extensions are different. The clipboard images are in tiff format and the saved images are in png. I know I can open them in preview and change the type - how do I do this so it saves ALL images as pngs by default?


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  1. By an anonymous user on Mar. 27, 2008

    Launch Terminal, and depending on what file type you want outputted, type (or copy and paste) the appropriate line below followed by return:


    defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf

    defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

    defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

    defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tif


    Quit Terminal and restart your computer for the change to take effect right away. To revert to the default png format, type 'defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png' as shown above (no single quotes), or delete the com.apple.screencapture plist file in your user preferences folder (again, you need to restart).


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  2. By smalltransport on Mar. 27, 2008

    another way to do this is to install the proprietary source application Cocktail which has a setting for this.


    http://ostatic.com/149705-software-proprietary/cocktail


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  3. By fpeter on Mar. 27, 2008

    @anon - thanks for this. I don't think this is working the way I thought it would.


    I can get the screencapture-to-image-in-desktop to work - it defaults to jpgs now. However, when I copy to clipboard and paste into mail, mail still shows it as a .tiff file. I don't know if this is because of mail.app or because you cannot change the default save type for the clipboard.


    Thanks anyway!


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