Carl Hutzler's Blog

Don’t you hate the fact that the Mac defaults to grabbing screen shots to PNG format? I know I do as I want to drop them into emails more often than not and I can’t rely on the recipient (on Windoze) being able to see them. I used to use a little utility called Drop JPEG which would quickly convert the PNG into JPG for me. But I found a better way.

Evidently the screen grab utility in Mac OS X can grab screenshots in just about any format including TIFF and PDF and others. But to change the default, you have to change a parameter in the PRAM (I think). A nice little program, which can do this (and many other things as well!) is called ONYX.

Just download it and fire it up. Enter your admin password. Then hit cancel on the SMART drive scanning stuff (unless you want to do that). Click on the PARAMETERS icon and under GENERAL you should see “Format Screen Capture”. Pick JPEG and viola!