title: HowTo: OS X screenshots without shadows
---
body:

The beautiful shadows that OS X brings to screenshots are good in some ways or
depending the purpose of the screenshot itself. But for other things are a
pain in the ass.

After some research I've found multiple ways to get rid of that shadows

## 1) The default setting

Since the terminal command allows you to deactivate the shadow I assumed that
there could be some `defaults` option for the same purpose. And it is!

With this two commands you can use the normal keybinds to do _shadowless_
screenshots:

``` text
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true killall SystemUIServer`
```

To revert to the original status:

``` text
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false killall SystemUIServer
```

## 2) The Grab utility

Open the Grab.app: `Applications > Utilities > Grab`, and under the `Capture`
menu you will find the `Window` option.

You can also use the `SHIFT`+`CMD`+`W` keybind -while Grab.app is focused-.

## 3) The terminal way

OS X provides us with the `screencapture` command, so we can hack around and
build our own scripts. A simple one that allows interactive capture without
shadow:

``` text
screencapture -i -o filename.png
```

A more complete one that saves the screenshot on the desktop with the datetime
as filename:

``` text
screencapture -i -o ~/Desktop/screenshot_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.png
```

These are some ways I found. You can play around and make your own bash or
Automator scripts and improve it to your needs.

Hope this helps!


---
pub_date: 2012-12-20
---
_template: blog/post.html
