Screenshot to PNG: paste your screenshot and save it as a PNG

1. 1Take the screenshot. On Windows, press Win + Shift + S and drag over what you want. On a Mac, press Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 4. Either way the screenshot goes to your clipboard, not to a file.
2. 2Paste it here with Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on a Mac). It turns into a PNG at once, at the same size in pixels.
3. 3Download PNG or Copy PNG. Download saves a file named screenshot with the date and time; Copy puts the PNG back in your clipboard, ready for Slack, Docs, Figma or a chat.

Every system takes screenshots in its own way, and not all of them leave a file. These are the shortcuts and where each screenshot ends up:

Win + Shift + S, Alt + Print Screen and Cmd + Ctrl + Shift + 4 copy the screenshot to the clipboard. To get a file out of it, the usual trick was to open Paint, paste and choose Save as PNG. This page does the same in one step: press Ctrl + V and then Download PNG.

It works with anything you copy as an image, not only screenshots: an image copied from a website, from a PDF or from a chat also becomes a PNG when you paste it here.

On Windows 11, the Print Screen key opens the screen capture tool, the same as Win + Shift + S: pick an area and it's copied. If your PC has it set the old way, Print Screen copies the whole screen and Alt + Print Screen only the window in front. In both cases, paste it here with Ctrl + V to get the PNG.

Win + Print Screen is the exception: it saves the whole screen straight to a PNG file in Pictures › Screenshots, so that one is already a PNG.

On an iPhone, press the side button and volume up at the same time. On Android, press power and volume down. The screenshot is saved in your photos.

To get it as a PNG, copy it and tap Paste on this page, or tap Choose screenshot and pick it from your gallery. Then tap Download PNG. Some Android phones, like many Samsung models, save screenshots as JPG; and a screenshot sent through WhatsApp or Messenger arrives as a compressed JPG. Passing it through here gives you a PNG again, although it won't get back the detail the JPG already lost.

Screenshots are mostly text, icons and flat colors. PNG keeps every pixel exactly, so the letters stay sharp. JPG is made for photos: it blurs the edges of the text and adds smudges around them, and a screenshot full of text often weighs even less as a PNG.

For a photo of the real world it's the other way around: JPG weighs much less. To convert photos and other formats, use Image to PNG, which takes JPG, WebP, AVIF and GIF.

Screenshots often show private things: chats, emails, bank details. Here the conversion happens in your browser; the screenshot doesn't reach our servers unless you choose to save it to Colurus.

Colurus is a clipboard history in the cloud. Paste a screenshot once and it's on your phone and your other computers, ready to copy back as PNG. AI reads the text in it, so you can find it later by searching a word that appears in the screenshot.