September, 2010 Archives

Tired of having your screenshots litter your desktop? Wish you could send them to a different, dedicated folder of your choosing instead? Are you ok digging into a little light terminal action? Then I have a great solution for you!

– Create a folder somewhere on your Hard Drive. For simplicity, I will assume you have created a folder on your Macintosh HD volume named “Screenshots”.
– Fire up Terminal (If you have to ask, it may be good to spend an hour learning about it BEFORE you do anything with this app!)
– Type the line below (beginning with “defaults”) at the $ prompt:

CODE:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Screenshots/

And in case you’d like to save these to your pictures folder (in your home folder) instead:

CODE:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/

IMPORTANT:  Don’t forget to restart your UI Server:

CODE:

killall SystemUIServer

Looking for a few other cool modifications?

Change the file format the screen capture is saved to, such as TIFF or JPEG:

CODE:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tif

Once again, any changes will require that you restart the UI Server:

CODE:

killall SystemUIServer

Hope that helps!