Changing the location of your screenshots on OSX

23/03/13 19:23 Filed in: Apple

Quick blog explaining how to change the folder location of your screen shots on OSX.

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I spend a lot of my time documenting systems hence I use the screenshot/screengrab features of OSX quite extensively. It can result in your desktop being massively cluttered with screen shots - which is unpleasant. I like my desktop clean!

There is a way however to change the location of where the screen shots go to - it’s a simple Terminal command. Fire up terminal and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /PathToYourFolder/

Where ‘/PathToYourFolder’ is the full location of your folder. Note that you cannot use the home folder shortcut here (~) - it has to be the full path. Also, don’t be tempted to think that you need SUDO - you don’t. If you use SUDO it won’t work as the permissions on the config file go screwey.

For example you could use:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/Mac/Screenshots/

If you wanted to send it to another volume you still have to fully qualify the path - for example:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Volumes/DataVol/ScreenShots/

..where ‘DataVol’ is the volume.

NOTE: Don’t forget the trailing ‘/’ as otherwise it doesn’t work.

Once you’ve entered your required path, logout & back in to have it take affect. You can also restart the SystemUIServer process if you don’t want to logout/in:

killall SystemUIServer

If you use Screen grabbing a lot, checkout the application TinyGrab. It’s a great little application - it will upload your screenshot immediately and host it for you and then copy the location in to your paste buffer.

Quite cool I think.

MAC

My Tech, My Travel, My Time

Changing the location of your screenshots on OSX