Set where Screenshots are Saved

Learn how to set where you r screenshots are saved to by default on the Mac.

By default, your Mac will save screenshots to your Desktop. This is fine if you do not take a lot of screenshots, but let’s say you do take a lot of screenshots. When you do, they clutter up your Desktop until you move them to a specific folder yourself. What you can do is have the Mac save screenshots to a specific folder automatically. This will help keep your Desktop a little cleaner or with less clutter. See how to set where you Mac saves screenshots by default in this video for the Mac.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can set where your screenshots are saved to on the Mac. By default, they’re saved to the desktop folder on your Mac, but maybe you want to save them to a specific folder, such as the screenshots folder. Let’s see how we do that. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, when you take a screenshot on the Mac, as saves it to the desktop, we can see that I have a couple of screenshots here.

Let’s go ahead and review how you take a screenshot and see how this works by default to take a screenshot. You just use the key command, shift, five. So I hold down the command key on the keyboard, shift, key and the five key.

We have a little modal window that pops up from here. I have a number of different options. We’re just going to go with a simple screenshot. I want a screenshot of the entire display. So I have this option here, the first option, Capturing Entire Display. I have that selected. So now all I need to do to take a screenshot of my entire display is just click anywhere and my display. We can see that the icon changed into a camera. I just click anywhere. Let’s go ahead and click.

We can see we have the thumbnail and after a few seconds, that thumbnail is going to be saved to my desktop. So by default screenshots are saved to the desktop. Here we can see it added it to my desktop.

What I would rather do is save these to a screenshots folder. So then it doesn’t clutter up my desktop. How do we do that? In my case, I want to save them to a screenshots folder. Well the first thing I need to do is create that folder that I want to save them in. So I’m going to create a screenshots folder. I’m going to save it to my desktop. So now I just go up to File in the menu bar, and we go over to New Folder. We can see, we have a new folder here. I’m just going to call it Screenshots. And again, this is on my desktop. Let’s go and move these three items here, these three screenshots, over to my folder here.

Now, what I want to do is have any screenshots that I take, any new screenshots that I take, automatically saved to this Screenshots. To do that. We have to pull up that modal window again, where we have all of our different screenshot options. So I hold down the command, shift, and five key again. We can see we have my modal window here.

Under Options is going to be an option for where you want to save your screenshots to. Again, by default, it’s saved to the desktop. I can select some predefined folders here, but what I would like to do is set it for my Screenshots. To do that, we just go over to Other Location and then I select that folder. So I need to go to my desktop here. You’re going to see I have Screenshots. I select, and then I click on Choose, or I could just double click on that folder. So let’s go ahead and click on Choose.

Now when I take a screenshot, instead of saving it to my desktop, what is going to do is save it to my Screenshots folder. So let’s go ahead and do that. I click anywhere. We can see, we have my thumbnail now, and after a few seconds, it’s going to move that screenshot into my Screenshots. We can see it as no longer on my desktop. But when I go over to my Screenshots here, remember I had three screenshots, when we look here, you’re going to see I have four screenshots. So it automatically moves any screenshots that I take into this folder.

So that’s how you can set where screenshots are saved on the Mac. All you have to do is just pull up the screenshot modal window, use command, shift, five. You’re going to see a number of different options. One of the options is a button called Options. When you click on that, you’re able to set where you want to save your screenshots too.

So that’s how you can set where screenshots are saved on the Mac.