How to Screenshot the Mac Dock

Thanks to a little-known shortcut, you can easily capture a clean screenshot of your Mac’s Dock without wallpaper, including translucency in the PNG alpha channel, with no cropping necessary. Here’s how to do it.

The Secret: a Simple Shortcut

Whenever you want to capture a screenshot of your Dock (and only your Dock), press Shift+Command+4, and then press the Space bar on your keyboard. This puts the screenshot tool into window and menu capture mode.

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After you press Space, your mouse cursor will turn into a camera icon. Place the cursor over your Dock. When you see that the Dock is highlighted, click your primary mouse button.

When you click, you’ll hear the screenshot sound effect. A clean image of your Dock in PNG format will be saved to your preferred save location (the Desktop, by default).

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Alternately, you can run the Screenshot app (or press Shift+Command+5), and then select the “Capture Selected Window” button (It looks like a small window icon.) in the screenshots toolbar that appears.

After you click, hover your mouse pointer over the Dock and click your primary mouse button to capture a screenshot of the Dock.

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What You Get

When you open the screenshot for closer viewing, you might notice that the PNG file includes a translucent alpha channel area for a shadow around the Dock and the Dock itself, depending on the OS you’re using.

In macOS 10.15 Catalina or earlier, the Dock itself will be pure opaque white. But in macOS 11.0 or later, the Dock will look translucent when viewed in a photo editing application. Either way, you’ll see no trace of the desktop wallpaper behind it, which is very handy.

Now that you have the Dock screenshot file, you can edit it or share it any way that you’d normally share a photo. Have fun!

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