As I’m writing blogs and work on my mac I fairly often take screenshots and includes it into my work (blogs, dokumentation etc). This is easily done by CMF + Shift + 4 (or 3 if you want to take a picture of the whole screen).

By default OSX stores them on the desktop and I hate to have my desktop cluttered by this.

So I checked how to move the location. And there is surely a way to do this.

So first you make a suitable directory for this (and this is all run from the terminal):

mkdir ~/Screenshots

Now that we have a directory we will user the defaults command to specify where the screenshots should be stored:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Screenshots

Now you need to restart the SystemUIServer to get it to reread the setting.

killall SystemUIServer

This will now be the place where you can get the screenshots.

Changing name and type

There are more things you can change with the defaults command.

You can change the name (the defaults is “Screen Shot (date)”) bu changing the com.apple.screencapture name property:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name "ScreenShot"

The file type of the screenshots can be changed with the com.apple.screencapture type property:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

You can use the following types:

• png (default)
• jpeg
• gif
• tiff
• pdf

And you have to kulle the SystemUIServer after all the changes:

killall SystemUIServer

So this is one more change you can do to tune you OSX system to what you want.