Mac Change Screenshot Location

I’ve always been frustrated by my screenshots being written to my desktop. I don’t have the personal discipline to stay on top of deleting them regularly and therefore end up with an extra messy desktop. What I wanted was to have all my screenshots created in a folder.

I like that Dropbox can change the location of my screenshots away from my Desktop but I realized I don’t like how it populates the clipboard with a link to the screenshot (additionally, over 99% of the time I don’t need the screenshot to be shared via URL). As an alternative, I wanted to change my screenshot location without using Dropbox to do it.

By running the following commands from the command line, I was able to change the location of my screenshots to a new folder called screenshots in my account.

$ mkdir ~/screenshots
$ defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/screenshots/
$ killall SystemUIServer

Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)

Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.