I've been lucky enough to continue to use a Mac in my predominantly Windows centric company.¹ As I've continued to migrate off my old MBP to my new MBP, I've had to remind myself on the smaller details to fix on my new laptop. So this post is more of a note to my future self when I finally replace my aging Mac Mini so I don't have to find the steps again.

A lot of my work includes taking screenshots and putting them into documentation. So I had a task today and completely forgot about the drop shadow macOS places on screen shots be default.

So I went to my research assistant and looked up how to disable the drop shadows. Most of the results gave the keyboard option to selectively disable the drop shadows by pressing a ridiculous keyboard combination of:

Command + Shift + 4 + Spacebar + Option

That was too much finger dexterity, and not enough muscle memory, for me to not permanently change the screenshot behavior. I went through my notes and found what I thought was the proper Terminal commands to disable drop shadows on screenshots.² After a couple of attempts, I concluded that either the command didn't work or macOS Monterey didn't have a Terminal command to do this anymore.

After some additional searching I found an update list of commands. ³

The Terminal command to remove the drop shadows is:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture "disable-shadow" -bool "true"

After turning off the drop shadows, either reboot or run the following command to make the change take effect:

killall SystemUIServer

To turn drop shadows back on, just reverse the setting to false:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture "disable-shadow" -bool "false"

After running the command to turn off drop shadows, my screenshots are flat again.

Update: Maybe I should just read my own blog... 🤣