everyday mac tools

Change where a Mac saves screenshots

· 5 min read

Press Command-Shift-5, click Options, and pick a folder under Save to. The list offers Desktop, Documents and a few app targets; Other Location lets you choose any folder on the Mac. Every screenshot and screen recording you take from then on lands there, including the ones you take with Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4.

Make the folder first

Create the destination before you change the setting, or the picker will make you do it mid-flow.

A folder called Screenshots inside your Pictures folder is the usual choice. Pictures is already in the Finder sidebar, it is backed up like everything else in your home folder, and it keeps images with images.

  1. Open Finder and select your home folder in the sidebar.
  2. Open Pictures.
  3. Press Command-Shift-N and name the new folder Screenshots.
  4. Drag it into the Finder sidebar while you are there.

Avoid pointing screenshots at a folder on an external drive. When the drive is unplugged, the destination is gone, and a screenshot you thought you took is not where you expect. Keep the folder on the internal disk and archive it later if it grows.

Change it in the screenshot toolbar

This is the way Apple intends, and it takes fifteen seconds.

  1. Press Command-Shift-5. A toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen.
  2. Click Options.
  3. Under Save to, choose your folder. If it is not listed, choose Other Location and select it.
  4. Press Escape to dismiss the toolbar.

The setting applies to everything: the whole-screen shortcut, the crosshair selection, window capture and both screen recording modes. There is no separate preference per shortcut.

The Save to list also includes Clipboard, Mail, Messages and Preview. Choosing Clipboard means nothing is written to disk at all and each capture is simply ready to paste. That is a legitimate setup for anyone who screenshots to send rather than to keep, and it eliminates the folder problem entirely. You can still get a one-off file by holding Control with the usual shortcuts, which reverses the behavior: with Save to set to a folder, Control-Command-Shift-4 copies to the clipboard instead of saving.

Or set it in Terminal

The toolbar writes an ordinary preference, and you can write it yourself. This is useful when setting up a machine, or when you want the change in a script you run on every new Mac.

  1. Open Terminal.
  2. Create the folder if it does not exist:
mkdir -p ~/Pictures/Screenshots
  1. Point screenshots at it:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots; killall SystemUIServer

The killall restarts the process that draws the menu bar so the new value is picked up. The menu bar flickers once; nothing else changes.

To go back to the Desktop, remove the preference rather than setting it to the Desktop path, so the setting returns to its default:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture location; killall SystemUIServer

If Terminal reports that the domain or default pair does not exist, the key was already unset and the Desktop is already the destination.

Two related preferences worth knowing

While you are in the same area, two more keys change things that annoy people about screenshot files.

The filename. Every capture is named “Screenshot” followed by the date and time. To use a different word:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name "Shot"; killall SystemUIServer

The date and time still follow it, which is what keeps names unique. Delete the key the same way to get “Screenshot” back.

The file format. PNG is the default and is the right choice for interface captures, where flat color and sharp text compress well and stay crisp. If you take photographic captures and the files are larger than you want:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg; killall SystemUIServer

Accepted values include png, jpg, pdf, tiff and heic. Think before switching: JPEG puts visible artifacts around small text, which is exactly what most screenshots are made of.

The iCloud Desktop trap

If you have Desktop and Documents folder syncing turned on in iCloud Drive, and screenshots are still going to the Desktop, every capture is being uploaded. On a slow connection or a full iCloud plan, that is a steady background cost for files that are mostly disposable.

Moving screenshots to ~/Pictures/Screenshots takes them out of the synced folders, because Pictures is not part of that feature. If you would rather change the sync behavior instead, saving new documents to your Mac instead of iCloud by default covers where that switch lives and what it does to files already uploaded.

Doing it as a set, with the rest of the screenshot settings

The Save to menu is one of several screenshot behaviors macOS keeps in different places or does not expose at all. If you are tidying all of them at once, the other two people usually want are the preview that hovers in the corner after each capture and the wide shadow around window captures: turning off the floating screenshot thumbnail and taking window screenshots without the shadow cover both.

Mainspring (https://trymainspring.com/) has a custom screenshot folder power-up along with screenshot without shadow and without the floating thumbnail, and groups them into a Screenshot Studio recipe applied and reverted as a set. Every power-up is a real macOS setting with the previous value recorded first, so a click puts it back. It is $29 once for up to three Macs, with a one-day trial and no account.

For one folder change, Command-Shift-5 is right there and no app is required. The case for one is a machine you are configuring from scratch, or wanting several settings reverted together later.

Questions

Do screen recordings go to the same folder? Yes. The Save to setting covers both recording modes in the Command-Shift-5 toolbar as well as still captures. Recordings are .mov files and are considerably larger, which is worth remembering if the folder is somewhere you sync.

I changed the folder and screenshots are still landing on the Desktop. Check whether you pressed Escape rather than clicking away after choosing, and take a fresh capture; the change applies to new captures only. If you set the location in Terminal without running killall SystemUIServer, log out and back in to make it take effect.

Can different shortcuts save to different places? No. There is one destination for all screenshot shortcuts. The nearest thing to an exception is holding Control, which sends that one capture to the clipboard instead of the folder.

Where does the Save to setting live if I want to check it? It is the location value in com.apple.screencapture. Run defaults read com.apple.screencapture in Terminal to see it and everything else set there. An empty result means nothing has been changed and the defaults are in force.