This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
As you may be aware the screen capture you undertake with shortcuts such as Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 will save your screenshots in .PNG format.
However, you can change this format to one of the following:
BMP, GIF, JPG, PDF, PICT, TGA, TIF
In order to do this we will need to use Terminal. To locate Terminal simply navigate to your Applications folder then to the Utilities Folder. Within the Utilities folder you will locate Terminal.
Simply launch and then enter the following followed by return:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type PDF
Then type the following followed by return:
killall SystemUIServer
You will notice that PDF is at the end of the first line. If you wanted your screenshots saved as a JPG simply replace PDF with JPG.
Should you wish to go back to the original PNG file format simply follow the steps as shown above and put PNG at the end of the first line.