Change screen shot saving location on Mac OS X

By default, when you do a screen shot in Mac OS X, screen shot images get saved on a desktop. Let me show you how to change the location.

If you haven't changed the location all the screen shots you make, appear on your desktop and consequently can your desktop become really messy.

Sure you can move or remove the screenshots afterwards but who does that anyway. ;)

Let's change the screen shot saving location.

Click the Spotlight search icon (see picture) ...

Click here for the how to use Spotlight search in Mac OS X Lion tutorial.

... enter terminal in Spotlight search field and click Terminal (see picture).

A command entry window shows up. Mac OS X is built on a Unix platform. Terminal is a command entry application where you can enter all the Unix like commands to make some tweaks to the Mac OS you otherwise couldn't by only clicking through the usual Settings and Preferences.

Let's say you want to save screen shot images in Pictures/Screenshots folder, you need to enter following line into Terminal window.

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

press Enter.

To activate the new save folder enter the following line into Terminal window:

killall SystemUIServer

press Enter.

Next time you'll make a screen shot, the screen shot image files will appear in /Pictures/Screenshots folder.