Written by Ivana - Reviewed by Tijana Gadgets / Apple Macbook
If you want to capture part of your Mac screen to show what you are seeing to someone or demonstrate an on-screen activity, you can easily take a screenshot.
However, if you only need a portion of the screen, or you want to hide some sensitive information, Mac offers the option to crop your screenshots. In this post, we’ll show you how to crop a screenshot on Mac in several different ways.
The easiest method for cropping a Mac screenshot is using the built-in screenshot cropping tool.
After you take a screenshot using the keyboard shortcuts Command + Shift + 3 (to capture a full screenshot) or Command + Shift + 4 (to capture a portion of your screen), follow the step below to crop the screenshot:
If you don’t see a thumbnail appearing at the bottom of the screen, you can access the cropping tool in another way:
Additionally, you can access the crop tool with Quick Look.
You can also use the Preview app to crop a screenshot on Mac.
The Preview app is used to open image files like JPG and PNG, various documents, and edit PDFs. It also offers photo editing and markup features, including a cropping tool.
To crop a screenshot with the Preview app:
Bonus read: How to delete screenshots on Mac.
The Photos app is the built-in Mac tool for managing and organizing your photos, but it also offers basic editing tools for resizing, cropping, zooming, creating GIFs, warping and even collaging your photos.
Here’s how to use the Photo app to crop a screenshot:
Besides the built-in tools for cropping screenshots on Mac, you can use a number of third-party apps to edit screenshots, which you can find in the Photo & Video section in the App Store.
Some of the popular apps are Adobe Lightroom, Polarr Photo Editor, Pixelstyle Photo Image Editor, etc. Each editing tool has slightly different editing tools.
For the purpose of this article, we’ll show the cropping steps in the Polarr Photo Editor:
You can also find similar snipping tools online if you don’t want to download any apps. Some of the most used tools you can use to crop a screenshot on Mac are IMG2Go, Picresize, ResizeImage and Cropp.me
If you also like to learn how to record screen on Mac with audio, check out our guide on that.