Screenshots and small automations

Press Command-Shift-3 for the full screen, Command-Shift-4 for a selection, or Command-Shift-5 for capture and recording controls.

Two refinements make these far more useful. After pressing Command-Shift-4, tap the Space bar: the crosshair becomes a camera and you capture a whole window, cleanly, with its shadow. And hold Control with any screenshot shortcut to copy the result to the clipboard instead of saving a file — perfect when the screenshot’s destination is a chat message or document, not your Desktop.

Command-Shift-5 opens a control bar with the extra options: screen recording, a timer, and the save destination. Saved screenshots land on the Desktop by default, named with the date and time. A thumbnail appears in the corner for a few seconds; click it to crop or annotate before the file is written.

Small automations with Shortcuts

Use the Shortcuts app for repeated tasks such as resizing images or organizing selected files. A shortcut is a chain of actions: take an input, transform it, put the result somewhere.

A practical example: converting images to JPG. Build a shortcut from three actions — “Get Selected Files in Finder”, “Convert Image”, and “Move File” to send the result to the Desktop. In the shortcut’s settings, enable Use as Quick Action for Finder. Now right-clicking any image shows Quick Actions → Convert to JPG.

One detail decides whether this feels polished or broken: in the first action, unselect every file type except images. Skip that, and the Quick Action appears when you right-click folders and PDFs too, where it does nothing useful.

You can run shortcuts from Terminal as well:

shortcuts list
shortcuts run "Convert to JPG" -i photo.png

shortcuts list prints every shortcut you have; shortcuts run executes one, with -i naming the input file.

Start with one action you already repeat often. One reliable three-step shortcut you use weekly is worth more than ten clever ones you forget exist.