_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

On Mac OS X, you have many different ways to take screenshots:

• Command + Shift + 3 - takes a fullscreen screen shot of the system and saves it to the Desktop
• Command + Shift + 4 - takes a screen shot of an area that you select using the selection rectangle that appears after then stores it on the Desktop
• Command + Shift + 4 then SPACE - takes a screen shot of a selected window on the display and stores it on the Desktop
• Command + Ctrl + Shift + 3 - takes a fullscreen screen shot and stores it on the clipboard
• Command + Ctrl + Shift + 4 - takes a screen shot of an area that you select using the selection rectangle that appears after then stores it on the clipboard
• Command + Ctrl + Shift + 4 then SPACE - takes a screen shot of a selected window on the display and stores it on the clipboard

I use the second one the most, because I find it more useful to have a copy of the screen shot on my system. But the problem is, I end up with too many images on my desktop.

I'd really like to fix this by making the screen shots go to my Pictures/Screenshots/ directory. So a bit of looking around the web and I found the solution using Bash:

To start with open up a new Terminal window. This can be found in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app.

Write/copy the following on a single line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/; killall SystemUIServer

And you are done!