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Changing the Default Screenshot Location

February 4, 2014

With using Pushfile more and more, I consistently find my Desktop littered with the screenshots I have taken. I found it interesting that OS X defaults its screenshot save location to your desktop, and there had to be a way to change it!

Luckily there is. And it is as easy as creating a place to hold your screenshots and changing a defaults line.

First let’s create a sane space to hold our screenshots… I chose /usr/local/screenshots/ but feel free to put them where you like.

$ mkdir /usr/local/screenshots/

Then you want to changed the default screenshot location. If you are not aware, there is a sort of API to change OS X defaults which can be used to change default functions of your operating system. Let’s change the screenshot location defaults:

$ defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /usr/local/screenshots

And that’s it. Now when you create a screenshot, it won’t clutter up your desktop but instead be saved somewhere sane. Only if there was somehow we can go about changing the name of the screenshots to get rid of this: Screen Shot 2014-02-04 at 10.02.07 AM