---
title: Opening Screenshots From a Vintage Macintosh in Modern macOS
description: Apple’s System 6 stored its screenshots in MacPaint format. Learn how to open them in recent versions of macOS.
date: 2022-07-03
url: https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintosh/
---


I recently added a [Macintosh SE 1/20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE) from 1987 to my vintage computer collection. For someone like me who grew up with DOS/Windows (and eventually Linux), and only made the switch to Mac OS X in 2010, it is quite interesting to explore the beginnings of macOS and find out which elements already existed in the early days.

I was amazed when I learned that the [keyboard shortcut for taking a screenshot (*Shift + Command + 3)* dates back to the initial release of classic Mac OS](https://www.howtogeek.com/811299/why-do-we-push-shift-command-3-to-take-a-screenshot-on-mac/) (called [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1)). So I had to try it on my new old Macintosh which was running System 6: And it worked! A file called “Screen 0” was created in the root of my system drive. I copied it over to my M1 MacBook from 2021 and tried to open it. However, it wasn’t mapped to any applications I had installed on my system, and also the file had no extension, making it a bit harder to guess what format it could be.

Some googling revealed that System 6 takes its screenshots in the ancient [MacPaint format](http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/MacPaint). I therefore tried adding the following extensions: `.mac`, `.pntg`, `.pic` to see if that would allow me to open the file in Preview. [A Reddit user reported that he had luck with changing it to `.pntg`](https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/84sslm/comment/dvt455d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), but that doesn’t seem to work anymore.

{{< img

  src="images/Screen-Shot-2022-07-03-at-18.48.24.png"
>}}

It looked promising as it will add Preview to the “Open With” menu, however, it will just open Preview and stop there.

The two options that *are* in fact working on modern macOS are converting it to PNG using [ImageMagick](https://imagemagick.org/) (command-line tool) or opening it in [GraphicConverter](https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/) (shareware GUI application).

*Side note: The MacPaint image format has a fixed size of 576×720 which explains why the screenshots from my vintage Macintosh have some white negative space at the right and at the bottom.*

## Command-Line

You can install ImageMagick via [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/):

```
$ brew install imagemagick
```

Assuming the screenshot from your vintage Macintosh is called “Screen 0” (without an extension), you can use the following commands to convert it to a PNG file:

```
$ convert mac:Screen\ 0 Screen\ 0.png
```

*Note that the prefix “mac:” will tell ImageMagick which decoder to use. Alternatively, you can rename the file to “Screen 0.mac” beforehand which will have the same effect.*

### Workaround for ImageMagick Bug

There was a bug in ImageMagick [that I reported while writing this blog post](https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/issues/5291). The resulting image was somehow scrambled and looked like this:

{{< img

  src="images/Screen-0.png"
>}}

To my surprise, [the bug was fixed **in less than 30 minutes**](https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/commit/e8a273560c58dc2a099b2989d5cfcd0021e40d51)! Pretty amazing.

If you don’t have access to the latest ImageMagick version and still experience this bug, you can use the following workaround.

First, install the *netpbm* package:

```
$ brew install netpbm
```

Then convert the image to PBM (portable bitmap format) and then to PNG:

```
$ macptopbm Screen\ 0 > Screen\ 0.pbm
$ convert Screen\ 0.pbm Screen\ 0.png && rm Screen\ 0.pbm
```

*This will also delete the intermediate PBM file if the PNG conversion was successful.*

## GUI Alternative

If you prefer a GUI tool, check out [GraphicConvert](https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/)er (shareware).

{{< img

  src="images/Screen-Shot-2022-07-03-at-18.53.01.png"
>}}

##