In this tutorial, we show you how to change the extension of our screenshots from PNG to JPG on iPhone/iPad and macOS.
Mobile phones and laptops are part of our daily lives and it is already an essential tool for the vast majority of users, offering a multitude of options that seek to make our lives easier. The number of tasks they can perform is simply overwhelming.
One of the most performed actions by many users is taking screenshots, either by sharing an image with a friend, or to immortalize part of a conversation or show someone content that we find interesting.
While most Android devices perform their captures in JPG format, Apple operating systems opt for PNG screenshotswhich may be a liability for some, as they generally have a larger file size, but they also have their advantages.
That’s why we are going to show you how to change its extension and format, both on iPhone (also applicable to iPad) and on Mac computers, without having to go to pages or programs that do the conversion for us.
How to Change PNG Captures to JPG on iPhone
The easiest way to get a capture in JPG format on our iPhone was previously to use the crop tool, which is integrated into the view that we get when we click on the capture that we find at the bottom left.
But in newer versions, these cropped screenshots are already automatically saved as PNGbecause Apple considers this format to be ideal and its compression allows to preserve as much detail as possible.
Therefore, the most effective solution without the need for programs is to send us the screenshot via AirDrop, which will send it in JPEG format instead of PNG. To implement this method, obviously we would need to have access to a Mac.
In this way, if our laptop or another iPhone/iPad receives this capture, it will be in the format we want without any modification being necessary.
In case you don’t have another Apple device, there is a very interesting solution and that is using Apple shortcuts. For this we have to do click on this link. This will be installed automatically on our iPhone, iPad or even Mac if we wanted.
With this shortcut we can select a photo from our gallery and choose the format in which we want to convert it, then choose again where we want to save it. As we can observe there are also different types of formats to choose fromalthough the one we want is JPEG.
How to Take Screenshots to JPG on macOS
For Mac computers the process is much simplersince changing the output format of it only requires a small command in the terminal.
In this case, if we want all our captures to be made in JPEG, we must enter the following command in the Terminal application and click on the Enter button, and automatically without doing anything our system will change the format.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg; killall SystemUIServer
It’s amazing how easily we can make such a simple change across different Apple platforms, where It would be interesting if in the iPhone settings they let you switch between the different formats.
As we can clearly see in the image below, our captures are now saved in the format indicated in the previous command, which makes the images take up less space in our system.
If we wanted to redo the captures in PNG format, we would simply have to redo a command, which would be the following:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png; killall SystemUIServer
Commands to Capture on Mac
Many users of the Apple computer line often use applications when taking screenshots in macOS, sometimes due to complete ignorance of the commands that the system itself provides us.
And there are two ways to take screenshots on these Macs, where we find an option to make a total capture of what we can observe, or also a partial capture of it.
In case you want a total screenshot, you have to press the buttons at the same time Command, Shift (up arrow) and the number 3. This way it will be saved as a JPG image on our desktop.
If we want a partial capture, we must follow a fairly similar command, where we also press the buttons at the same time Command, Shift and this time the number 4. The mouse pointer will change and this tells us that we need to select the specific area we want to capture.
Is PNG better than JPG?
There are significant differences between JPEG images and PNG images, but it’s hard to say if one is better than the other.
JPEG images are generally smaller, making it easy to store and share. It’s also easy to reduce the size of a JPEG even further.
However, PNG images are higher quality and can be transparent, although for the specific case of screenshots it doesn’t matter.
It all depends on whether the user takes a lot of screenshots and therefore how much space they have on their Mac or iPhone, where the choice of format can be important.
We hope that with these little tricks you can easily choose between the two most common formats that can be found today, and that they will be of great help to you in the future.