My Mac was annoyingly slow for a couple weeks and I couldn’t figure out why. I did a little research and found out that having items in your Desktop folder significantly slows down your computer…and I had over 2,000 items in there. None of the items in there were useful, they primarily consisted of client screenshots that were not cleared out. So, I ended up moving my miscellaneous Desktop items to my Downloads folder. However, it left me with a problem, how do I change where mac’s save screenshots, so that I don’t accumulate all of these items in my Desktop. And, here is the super simple answer.
Step 1: Create a Folder where you want to store Screenshots
If this folder already exists, just note where on your computer it lies. In my case, it was in Users/robert/Downloads.
Step 2: Update the com.apple.screencapture default value
In order to overwrite the existing default value of com.apple.screencapture, you need to open up terminal on your mac. Hold down command and spacebar at the same time and type in terminal if you don’t know how to find it. Then, enter the following command. But, make sure to use the path to the folder that you want to store screenshots in, in my case that is /Users/robert/Downloads.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/robert/DownloadsAnd, that’s all there is to it! Now, every time you take a screenshot on your Mac it will save to the new directory that you specified.