A buddy of mine was asking me the other day how to clean up his desktop because it was littered with screenshots so I offered him a suggestion: Why not just save the screenshots to a folder to keep things clean?

I did some searching and thought I’d share with you. This works and has been tested on 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Instructions below:

Follow these steps to do it manually:

• Locate or create the folder you want your screenshots to save to
• Go to your Applications folder, Click “Utilities” and open the Terminal app.
• Type the following without the quotes “defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder”
• After the word “location” you can delete “/Full/Path/To/Folder”. Drag the folder you created/located on the step into the Terminal and it should add the path automatically.
• Press Enter.
• It might ask for your Admin password.
• Log out and Log back in.
• Take a test screenshot using either Grab, CMD+Shift+3, or CMD+Shift+4 to see if it worked properly.

If you’d like you may prefer downloading a third party application to do it for you. Personally, I’m not a fan of adding more software but if the above is too much for you download TinkerTool. After you install it, click the “General” tab and once it’s open look half way down the menu and you can see a drop down labeled “Target folder for screenshots”. Choose the folder.

Enjoy!

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