Transferring the current on-screen image to a graphics file or the clipboard. In Windows, pressing certain keyboard commands copies either the current window or entire screen to the clipboard, the contents of which has to be pasted into an application to view or print it (see Win Print screen). The Mac has key commands for copying a window, a selected part of the screen or the entire screen either to the clipboard or a new file on the desktop (see Mac Print screen).

There are also numerous screen capture (screen grabber) programs that offer many more sophisticated capabilities such as extracting only the text from a window. Some programs can capture the contents of scrollable windows.