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Capturing macOS screenshots and onscreen objects

I capture a lot of screenshots—both for this blog, and for our Many Tricks' help files and web pages. Depending on the project, I may need a full screen, a portion of a screen, a window, an object, or some combination of the above. As such, I use a few different ways of capturing screenshots.

First up are the built-in macOS screenshot tools, which you'll find on the Keyboard System Preferences panel, in the Shortcuts tab:

These four commands let you capture full screens or windows, directly to files or to the clipboard. And, for many users, these may be all you need. If that's you, great! (You may want to assign some easier-to-type shortcuts, as these—especially the clipboard variants—require some advanced finger gymnastics.)

I use some of these built-in tools, along with a key third-party app, to handle all my image capture needs.

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Capture a series of screenshots and create a movie

At my day job with Many Tricks, we recently updated our time tracking app Time Sink to version two, and an updated web page was part of the project. For the header area, I wanted to create a time-lapse movie showing the Time Sink Activity Report window changing over an extended period of time (90 minutes), but compressed into a short amount of real-world time (about 14 seconds).

Before the how-to, here's how the final project came out:

To create the time-lapse movie, I'd need a series of screenshots recorded at a fixed interval. I wanted to shoot only the content area of the report window, as I didn't need the "chrome" for the movie (it would just distract from the content). So using the built-in screenshot tool wouldn't work—I didn't want to have to crop 500+ images (even by script).

While I'm sure there are many utilities that can do this (and I'll see them shortly in the comments), a brief web search found nothing that was designed to capture areas of the screen at a set interval. Luckily for me, though, Keyboard Maestro has a screenshot action that can record an area of the screen, along with repeat and wait actions I could use to capture a series of stills.

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