Update Your Screen Capture (Screenshot) Location on Mac OS X

Little tip for changing the default path where the Mac screen capture tool drops the screen shots you take. By default any screen shots are dropped on your desktop, which if you are as anal as I am in keeping a clean desktop, does my nut in!

You can also get a number of Mac apps that will do this, but if you like me want to just sort it and be done with it here it is.

Open up terminal.

Firstly you will need to create your new directory that will house your screen shots. A good place could be a folder on your desktop or in your documents with a nice shortcut in your Finder places.

mkdir -p /Users/yourname/Documents/Screenshots

Make sure you change “yourname” to your short username (this is normally your name in lowercase and spaces removed). For example, my name is Adam Stacey, so my short username is adamstacey.

Then you need to change the screen capture location:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/yourname/Documents/Screenshots

Before it will work you will need to log out and back in again or if you are lazy like me you can restart the service that looks after the screen capture by:

killall SystemUIServer

Now you can test the screen capture by pressing shift+cmd+3 or shift+cmd+4. Your screen shots should now be in your new folder.