By default, anytime you take a screen capture in Mac OS X, the resulting screenshot file will save to the current users desktop. This makes retrieval very easy and is very appropriate for the average Mac user, but for those who take a lot of screen shots in OS X, they may find their desktop to be cluttered with the screenshot files rather quickly.
An excellent solution is to adjust the default location of where Mac OS X saves captured screen shot files to another location in the file system when Command + Shift + 3 is pressed, this walkthrough will show you how to do that with a defaults command.
How to Change Where Screen Shots Save on Mac
You will need to use the command line to change the save location of screen shots in Mac OS X. Thus, the first thing you’ll need to do is launch the Terminal app from /Applications/Utilities/ to get a prompt.
The general syntax for changing screenshot file location is as follows, note it must be entered on a single line and with a proper path set for the new screencapture save location to take effect:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /path/;killall SystemUIServer
Change the ‘/path/’ sequence to where you want the screen shot files to save to. For example, if I want to have the screenshots appear in the user (~) Pictures folder, I would use:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/
Hit the return key to set ~/Pictures as the location. You’ll need to follow it up with a SystemUIServer relaunch too:
# killall SystemUIServer
Changing Back to the Default Screen Shot File Save Location in Mac OS X
If you decide having screencaptures automatically saved to another location on the Mac is no longer what you’d like to do, you can always change the saved screenshot location back to the OS X default setting simply by specifying the desktop again in the aforementioned defaults command sequence. The default save location would thus be the following:
# defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/
Again, you’d need to kill SystemUIServer for changes to take effect.
# killall SystemUIServer
You can again verify the change has been set back to the default by hitting Command+Shift+3 to capture the screen as a file in OS X, and look on the active user accounts desktop to find the screen shot file.