How to disable drop shadow in Mac OS screenshots

Sometimes you want your screenshots to be smaller in sizes so that you can share them easily. Also, if you are sharing them on website like I do, you want them to be small in size so that your webpage loads quickly. By default when you take screenshot in Mac, it shows a drop shadow (a shadow of window) in screenshots, that looks cool but it makes your file size lager and doesn’t serve any purpose. In this guide I will share how to disable the the drop shadow in screenshots.

Disabling drop shadow

In order to disable, you need to open the terminal first. To open it go to Applications ❯ Utilities ❯ Terminal

Type the following command and hit enter.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool TRUE;killall SystemUIServer

Now you can verify the change by taking a screenshot. Press Command + Shift + 3 to take the full page screenshot, you will find that the drop shadow is now removed and the file size is comparatively smaller. If you looking for reducing the screenshot size further then checkout my guide to change the screenshot file format from .png to .gif that will make a huge difference in file size.

Reverting the changes

If you want to enable the drop shadow again in the screenshots for some reason then type the following command in terminal and hit enter. This will enable the drop shadow feature again.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool FALSE;killall SystemUIServer