How to Screenshot the Touch Bar on a MacBook Pro

The Mac screenshot family has a forgotten member: Cmd + Shift + 6, which captures whatever your Touch Bar is showing. If you're documenting an app's Touch Bar controls — or filing a bug about them — it's the only way to get that second screen into an image. Here's the shortcut, the clipboard variant, and the model fine print.

The shortcut: Cmd+Shift+6

1. Get the Touch Bar showing what you want — Touch Bar contents change per app, so bring the relevant app to the front and, if needed, tap into the state you're documenting.
2. Press Cmd + Shift + 6.

The capture saves to your Desktop (or your custom screenshot destination) named like any other screenshot. The image is exactly what the OLED strip was displaying at that instant: a very wide, very short PNG — think of a ribbon a couple of thousand pixels across and only a few dozen tall. It respects the same screenshot preferences as everything else, including your chosen save location and file format.

Because Touch Bar contents are contextual, timing matters: the capture grabs the strip as it is, mid-animation included. For control strips that change on touch-and-hold (like the volume slider), you may need a couple of attempts to catch the state you want. Two states worth capturing deliberately: hold Fn and the strip switches to traditional function keys — press the shortcut while holding it to document that layout — and tapping the ⟨ chevron expands the Control Strip to full width, which captures just as it appears.

Copy it to the clipboard instead

The Ctrl convention from the other screenshot shortcuts carries over: press Ctrl + Cmd + Shift + 6 and the Touch Bar strip goes to the clipboard — no file, paste with Cmd + V straight into the bug report or chat. Both variants are listed (and re-bindable) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screenshots, alongside the shortcuts for regular captures. The clipboard variant is usually the better fit here: Touch Bar strips are odd-shaped files that clutter a Desktop, and they almost always exist to be pasted into a report and forgotten.

Which Macs this applies to

The shortcut exists only where the hardware does. Touch Bar MacBook Pro models:

• 13-inch MacBook Pro — 2016 through the M2 model (2022), the last Touch Bar Mac sold.
• 15-inch MacBook Pro — 2016–2019.
• 16-inch MacBook Pro — 2019 (Intel) only; the 2021 redesign dropped the Touch Bar.

On any other Mac, Cmd + Shift + 6 simply does nothing — the shortcut isn't listed in Keyboard Shortcuts because there's no Touch Bar to capture. All Touch Bar models run macOS 13 Ventura; most run Sonoma and Sequoia too, and the shortcut behaves identically across all three.

If the shortcut does nothing on a Touch Bar Mac

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screenshots.
2. Confirm the Touch Bar capture entries are enabled (checkboxes ticked) and note their current key combos — something may have re-bound them.
3. Click Restore Defaults in that pane if the bindings look wrong.

Third-party Touch Bar customizers are the other usual suspect — tools that redraw the strip with their own widgets capture their rendering, or intercept the shortcut entirely. Quit the customizer and recapture if the image doesn't match what you see. And a related note for documentation work: the screenshot of the Touch Bar is just an image of the strip — if you also want the on-screen action that accompanies it, take a normal Cmd + Shift + 4 capture too, and pair the two images in your doc.