Take a Timed Screen Shot in Mac OS X
You can take time delayed screenshots in Mac OS X by using the Grab utility or the Terminal. Grab and Terminal are bundled with every Mac in your /Applications/Utilities/ directory, find them there or launch it with Spotlight (Command+Space). We’ll cover Grab first because it’s more user friendly and doesn’t involve the command line.
Timed Screen Shots with Grab
Once you’re in Grab: Pull down the “Capture” menu and select “Timed Screen” or hit Command+Shift+Z to bring up the timed capture alert dialog that you see in the screenshot above. When you’re ready, click on “Start Timer” and you’ll have 10 seconds to stage your screenshot before Grab snaps the entire screen.
You’ll notice Grab won’t be visible in the screenshot, which is nice otherwise the app would be kind of useless.
Time Delayed Screen Shots via Terminal
If you’re inclined to travel the more technical road, you can also take time delayed screen shots from the Terminal using the screencapture command:
screencapture -T 10 osxdaily.jpg
You can adjust the time to anything in seconds, that example is for a 10 second delay. The filename follows, which will be created in your users home directory unless you specify otherwise. You can see some more screencapture options here.
You’ll notice I say screen shot, but those coming to the Mac from Windows often refer to this process as “Print Screen” thanks to the little button on their old PC keyboards. Unless you time the pressing of that button, timed screenshots are a feature of Mac OS X only. Also you might notice in that screenshot that I’m hiding my Mac OS X menu bar, this is achieved through a 3rd party utility called MenuEclipse.
I guess I don’t see the purpose of this when you can just hit Command+Shift+3 and take a screenshot at any time in any situation.
I agree with Ian.
I never use Grab – And I don’t see the utility of a timer, but probably there are some (?)
Command+Shift+3 > Full Screen
Command+Shift+ 4 > Select what you want dragging a rectangle around
Command+Shift+3 – and then space bar > click on the window of which you want a screenshot……
Alberto, of course there is a need for a timer:
Sometimes you need to take a snapshot of a pull down menu… there is no other way…
Sorry, it is:
Command+Shift+4 – and then space bar > click on the window of which you want a screenshot……
Just because you personally don’t use it, doesn’t mean a delayed snapshot isn’t useful. Control your digital narcissism!
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