Hey

Anytime you press Command + Shift + 3 to take a screenshot of your screen or Command + Shift + 4 to take a screenshot of part of the screen, the saved image will be normally saved on your desktop. If you don’t like this location you can change it with a quick Terminal command. This allows you to change the location to something more suitable such as the root of your hard drive, or some other specific location.

To make this change open Terminal location in Applications > Utilities and type the following, change the path in the double quote marks to the location you want. When you have type (or copied and pasted) the command, press enter.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location -string "path/to/location"

Then restart your Mac. Note, that you can have this path to any location you can write to as a normal user. A little tip here is to replace /Users/[name] with $HOME. So /Users/James/Desktop becomes $HOME/Desktop. I like to put my screenshots in a sub folder of the desktop, when you start taking a few screen shots my desktop soon becomes cluttered.

If you don’t like the change or want to move it back, simply change the path in the double quote marks. You will have to restart your Mac to make the change. You may be able to get round this by killing a process and restarting it, such as your dock or Finder. However I haven’t managed to find the process that controls the app used to take screenshots. If you know, please let me know by leaving a comment.

A simple change, but simple and possible very useful.