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I've seen quite a number of login screen screenshots. I've tried Cmd + Shift + 3, but to no avail. How do I take a picture of the login screen or the boot screen of OS X?

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3 Answers

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You can SSH into another Mac and use screencapture in the shell.

  1. Enable remote login in the sharing preferences on the other computer
  2. ssh username@other_computers_ip
  3. sudo screencapture ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
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Does this really work? The man page for screen capture (in Lion) says "SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS: To capture screen content while logged in via ssh, you must launch screencapture in the same mach bootstrap hierarchy as loginwindow". – lhf May 24 '12 at 13:41
@lhf I actually don't know. At least something like sudo bash; screencapture worked on an earlier version of 10.7. @bmike edited it to sudo screencapture. (I no longer have another Mac to ssh to — can someone test whether that works as well?) – Lauri Ranta May 24 '12 at 14:24
up vote 5 down vote

I have not tested this myself, but maybe this link will help. Grab 'impossible' screenshots

OS X includes a nice command-line screen capture utility named, simply enough, screencapture. While there’s not a ton of documentation on this program, man screencapture will give you the basic options. Once you’ve used ssh to connect to the Mac whose screen you wish to capture, you need to execute the screencapture command with root privileges.

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It would be awesome, and helpful for future readers, if you'd quote the relevant bit of the article (with attribution) in the event that the linked article goes away. In this case Lri has already jumped in and listed the procedure you were citing, so I included an explanatory paragraph rather than the line listing. – jaberg Mar 6 '12 at 14:08
up vote 1 down vote

Ensure that fast user switching is enabled, then open grab, take a timed-screen, you have 10 seconds to switch to the login window via fast user switching - don't log out!

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I was able to get a screen capture of the fast user switching login view, but not the main login screen or the boot screen. – tlatkovich Mar 9 '12 at 17:15

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