Changing the default Mac screen shot image type

I recently had the need to change the default Mac OSX takes it’s screen shots in. There’s some occasions where you need more quality than PNG and some occasions where you need a file anyone can open and simply don’t want PNG as your default.

Well, in OSX 10.4 and onwards you can change the default screen shot format.

Start by opening Terminal, located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal

Type in:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
killall SystemUIServer

Replace image_format with your selected format that you wish to change the default setting to. The second line reloads the default so that you don’t need to log out and back in again for the change to take effect. The next time you take a screen shot after executing both of these commands, it will be saved in the new format you have chosen.

Below is a list of several popular image types and their commands in full should you wish to paste them.

BMP

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type bmp
killall SystemUIServer

GIF

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif
killall SystemUIServer

JPG

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer

PDF

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
killall SystemUIServer

PNG

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer

TIFF

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tiff
killall SystemUIServer

  • Jamie Huskisson
  • Filed in: articles

7 Responses

  1. Beppe Bravi aka Beppone —

    Thank you very much… veeery interesting info.
    Have a nice day.
    Beppone

  2. ryan —

    Thanks. I just tried this, but it doesn’t seem to be changing. Still stuck in tiff. OS X 10.5.6

  3. brianjlandau (Brian Landau) —

    @cdrum here’s a tip for you http://bit.ly/cs73W or you could try http://skitch.com/

  4. Damien —

    Thanks very much, just what I needed!

  5. RicG —

    Many thanks! I was having a problem with the screen capture failing with the message “Unable to create type string”. I discovered that the plist was set to pict (no longer supported in SL) and, based on several suggestions, used the defaults write fix to change it to png. Had no effect until I restarted the SystemUIServer. I’m a Mac support guy and hate being stumped!

  6. Ray —

    Thanks! this did the trick

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