Add a Timer to Screenshots

Learn how to delay when screenshots are taken by adding a timer for screenshots on the Mac.

Did you know you could delay when your Mac takes a screenshot? You can delay it by 5 or 10 seconds. This is great for when you need to take a screenshot of something your Macis doing, but everytime you try, it takes the screenshot too early. See how to delay when screenshots are taken in this video for the Mac.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can set a screenshot timer on your Mac. Basically, what we’re able to do with a screenshot timer is set how long before our Mac takes a screenshot. Let’s see why we would want to do this and how we do this on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now let’s first review, how you take a screenshot. It’s pretty simple. All we need to do to take a screenshot is use the key command command shift five. So I hold down the command key, the shift key, and then I press the five key. We have a little window that pops up and I have a number of different options for taking a screenshot.

Over on the left I can set if I want to take a screenshot of the entire display, the selected window, or I can draw a portion on my screen. The one on the left here is selected. This is the entire display. So now to take a screenshot, all I really need to do is just click anywhere and it’ll take a screenshot. So it’s pretty simple command shift five, select where you want to take a screenshot of, and it’ll take a screenshot.

But now let’s say you wanted to add a delay to this. You are working on something and you need to click on something, but when you click on it, it’s going to take this screenshot. So that really doesn’t help. You first need to click on it and then you want to take the screenshot. So how do you do that? You need to add a timer. You need to delay when that screenshot is taken. Well, it’s pretty simple to do as well.

All we need to do is go back to our little modal here that shows all of our different screenshot options. And again, if you do not see this, I’m going to close this. If you do not see that, command shift and five, we have our little window there. And then over to the right, you’re going to see Options. One of the options we have here is for our timer. I can set it for five seconds or 10 seconds.

let’s go ahead and set it for five seconds. Now what’s going to happen here is when I click, you can see I have the camera here. When I click, what it’s going to do is wait five seconds before it takes a screenshot. So that gives me a little bit of time to do what I need to do.

So let’s go ahead and do that. I’m going to select a menu. So the first thing I need to do is I need to click to get the timer going. So I click, I have five seconds. We can see it counting down here. Now I just go up to my menu. I select what I want, and we can see it took a screenshot.

If that’s a little too quick for you, maybe you need to move it to 10 seconds, because you do have to move quickly with five seconds. All you have to do is just hit command shift five again, and then we go under Options, and we select 10 seconds. This will give you a little bit more time. So now I select this and now if I click on my track pad or if I had a mouse, if I clicked on the mouse, what would happen is as it would start counting down, I have 10 seconds.

Let’s go ahead and click on this. We can see it as counting down. So now I have 10 seconds to do what I need to do to get that screenshot. So let’s go ahead and go back up under window. And now it just took that screenshot. We can see it here on my Desktop. It’s going to move it to my Desktop here. There it is on my Desktop.

So that’s how you can add a delay to screenshots on the Mac. All you have to do is just pull up the little model where we have all of our different options for screenshots, go under Options and set the timer. You can set it for a none, which means it’s going to take a screenshot immediately after you click your track pad, or you can set it for five seconds or 10 seconds. With either one of those, as soon as you click, it’s going to have a countdown timer. And then after the countdown timer gets to zero, it’s going to take a screenshot.

So that’s how you can add a timer to screenshots on the Mac.