Change Where Screenshots Are Saved On Your Mac With A Terminal Command

Change Where Screenshots Are Saved On Your Mac With A Terminal Command

Mac: Taking a screenshot on a Mac is easy, but if you take them often, having them littered across your desktop is a pain. You could use a third-party app to redirect where they’re saved for you, or even upload them to the cloud, but if you don’t need all that, this terminal command will save them anywhere you choose.

Greg Muender explains over at a post on Medium that he was tired of his screenshots ending up on the desktop, and he also didn’t want to use an app that was always running to move them or copy them to his clipboard. Instead, he created a “Screenshots” folder in his “Documents” folder. Then he opened up a terminal window, and typed:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Documents/Screenshots

After that, he restarted Finder by typing:

killall SystemUIServer

That’s all there is to it. From then on, any screenshots he takes are automatically saved to the “Screenshots” folder for future use, and he keeps a nice clean desktop. You can replace the “~/Documents/Screenshots” with any folder you choose or create — you can move them all to your Dropbox folder for easy sharing, for example. For a screenshot walkthrough of the tip, hit the link below.

Hate How Screenshots On A Mac Save To Your Desktop? [Greg Muender (Medium)]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments