Annotate, Drag, & Drop Screenshots on Mac

When it comes to work-productivity on computers, speed is king. We perform the same tasks over and over again throughout the workweek. With many various methods at our disposal, some are slow and cumbersome, while the less obvious paths can often speed up productivity. Learning efficient ways to do the same work, such as quickly taking a screenshot and sharing it in an email or Zoom chat, will save time and free up mental energy.

Following up on the many ways you can take a screenshot on Mac or PC, let’s look at ways to use the screenshots on Mac after you snap them.

Using the Screenshot Thumbnail on macOS

Immediately after taking a screenshot on macOS, you might notice that a thumbnail image of the screenshot briefly appears in the lower right-hand corner of your screen. While that image is there you can do a number of useful actions.

Fast Drag & Drop

 

 

One of the fastest ways to share a screenshot is to click on the thumbnail immediately after you’ve taken the screenshot and drag it into a corresponding application, such as Gmail:

 

Or into Zoom’s chat:

Annotating a Screenshot

Annotating, or “marking up” a screenshot is one of the most useful ways to add guidance to an image, such as for instructional use, creating tutorials, or adding text or signatures to images when needed. In fact, every screenshot taken for this Tip of the Day was dragged, dropped, and annotated using these methods!

To annotate you have two options.

1.  Either click once on the thumbnail of a screenshot immediately after you have taken it:

   

   *the image is a screenshot of a portion of a desktop, Handbrake is a shortcut.

    

2. Or you can double-click on the screenshot file to open it in “Preview” and then click on the “Markup” tool:

   
   
    

As demonstrated in the screenshot annotations above, you can easily highlight parts of your image using the shapes tool:

The shapes tool includes arrows for pointing out specifics in your image.  Text can be added via the textbox tool: 

which includes options for fonts, sizes, and colors. Play around with the various annotation tools and you can find many ways to make this quick feature useful.

Note: there are a few differences between the markup in Preview and in the quick annotation thumbnail, but the functionality is similar.