One thing that drives me crazy with little things overlooked in OSX, is that so many trends in the interface and general design guides point to Minimalism, and yet the default behavior of taking screenshots is to clutter your desktop. Does this look familiar?

Based on some screens I’ve seen of people doing screencasts/webinars, this is a REALLY tame snapshot. Take screenshots frequently, and you easily have 100’s of files, and eventually they even overlap on the screen:

I couldn’t bare the though of doing this, even to take a screenshot, so I took this image from Google Search.

So the solution for this is to create a folder to organize these files, and then change the default location setting within the OS. I personally have ALL my working files (code, images, everything) structured under a single folder on my desktop, which I then have setup backup/sync processes… a post for another day.

To change your default:

  1. Note that this ends with a space, DO NOT hit Return yet: 
    defaults write com.apple.screencapture location
  2. Drag the folder you want to store in, over to Terminal, and it fills in the full path, then hit Return. If you are a CLI Ninja, you know of course you can type this in yourself, but this is less error-prone for the rest of us
  3. Then to force it to go into effect immediately, enter this and then hit return: 
    killall SystemUIServer

{ Click the animation below to see larger version }

 

Now screenshots will be sent to this folder, and no more clutter on the desktop.