Chromebooks 101: how to take screenshots on your Chromebook

Screenshots are useful for a lot of things. You can send error messages to support services, show a friend what your game screen looks like, or save a message that you think will be deleted in a few minutes. Today's laptops include a way to take a picture.

The keyboards on Chromebooks are a bit different than those of Macs or Windows PCs, which can be a little confusing for someone new to the platform. New keys have been added while some keys are missing. You can either use a key combination or use the Quick settings pop-up.

Screenshots via Quick Settings

• Click on the clock in the lower-right corner of your screen. This will bring up your Quick Settings menu.
• Click on the Screen Capture icon. (It looks like a circle in a square.)

There is a menu at the bottom of the screen. They will include from left to right.

• Screenshot (for still captures)
• Screen record (for video captures)
• Take full-screen screenshot
• Take partial screenshot (a crosshair icon will appear; click and drag it until the part of the screen you want to copy is highlighted and then let go).
• Take windows screenshot (for a single window)
• Settings

Image: Google

If you click on the settings icon, you can adjust your audio input, choose whether your mic should be live, and save your recordings to a folder.

Using the keyboard

Key combinations speed up the process of taking a picture.

If you want to take a picture of the entire screen, use the show windows key combination. There is a show windows key on the top row of the keyboard. The F5 key is similar to the one on a PC keyboard.

• Press the Shift + Ctrl + Show windows keys to get the same menu that you’d get by going into the Quick Settings menu.

Save and edit your screenshot

A copy of the screenshot will show up in a pop-out window after you take it. To see it in the folder, click on it. You can change which folder you want to save it to in the screen capture menu.

Click on the buttons to change or remove something. Cropping and rotating, rescaling, annotating, and tweaking the lighting are some of the tasks that can be performed with the help of the Edit button.

Related

Chrome OS 101: How to save and retrieve files

The article was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated to account for changes in the OS.