Changing location to store screenshot

The default place where screenshots are saved in OSX is the Desktop. For people (like me), who would like to keep their desktops nice and clean and a little organised, we can change the location where the screenshot are stored. This needs command line. Launch “Terminal” and type the following commands which should do the trick. I am moving my screenshot location to somewhere in Google Drive. Please note that the location which you are setting as the target for storing screenshots, must exist, and as you can see, I am creating it first.

$ mkdir -p ~/Google\ Drive/Pictures/Screenshots
$ defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Google\ Drive/Pictures/Screenshots/ && killall SystemUIServer

The “killall” command is used to restart the SystemUIServer so that the changes can be picked up by the system.

Changing the Screenshot file type

The default screenshot file type is PNG. However, you can change this to – jpg, tiff, pdf, gif by using the following command on the terminal.

$ defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif && killall SystemUIServer