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First of all Im sorry for the very long title. I just wanted you to know that I have slipped in the trick of how to save the screenshots that you make on a make in a folder other than the desktop which is the default. If you have not tried the Mac screenshot capture tool which comes with your Mac OS X operating system then you may wonder what all the fuss is about.

But once you get to use the simplicity and easy of the Mac Capture tool, you will end up with a Desktop that is full of snapshots. Why? Well a picture paints a thousand word they say, also have you ever been in the situation when you are trying to save something and it just will not copy and paste? Or, trying to describe something was just too difficult. Well the Mac screenshot capture tool just snaps away in milliseconds.

So before we start lets make a folder for your screenshots and my one is always called screenshots so I can remember.

You need to use a command line command which may sound alien to some of you. So I will keep this super simple:

First we need to open a terminal

To open a terminal on a Mac you need to go to your applications folder, then your Utilites folder and inside you will see an application called Terminal.app you want to double click this to open a black looking box called a terminal. The Terminal is a way that we can talk to the system directly and call on different preplanned actions and tell them what we want to achieve.

Using ‘default’ to alter the default location of the Mac screenshot capture tool

First of all we need to make a folder where we want to save the screenshots. For example we could choose the desktop.

Once we have this folder we need to see this in a Finder window which we will use later.

Now in the terminal

We need to type the following (Just copy and paste)

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location

Note: There is a space after location.

Now drag the folder you created from the Finder window into the Terminal window. This will write the path of this folder. For a folder located in your desktop this would look like this:

/Users/username/Desktop/screenshots

So the command would look like this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/myname/Desktop/screenshot

For a folder located in your documents folder it would look something like this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/username/Documents/screenshots

Now make it stick

To make this work you now need to logout and login again. You can do this from the little apple symbol in the top left of the screen of by using this keyboard shortcut for logging out of your system: SHIFT + CMD + Q

Once you have logged back into your Mac you will be able to use the Screenshot Capture tool or the Screencapture tool as its called by some. To do this you need to learn a few more keyboard shortcuts.

How to use the Screencapture tool on the Mac

As we mentioned before the screencapture tool is very fast and quick. By using the: CMD + SHIFT + 4 release. Then drag with the mouse and left button, then release. Boom you have a screenshot.

Its really that simple and after a few days of screenshotting you will be knee deep in screencaptures.

One of the best things is that you can drag these into you Mail client or even Skype and your screenshots will be in front of your friends in seconds.

As a designer this is probably the tool I use the most out of all the other gadgets that are provided on the Mac OS X.

Detailed table of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard Included) keyboard shortcuts for the screen capture screenshot tool

Screen Capture – Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut combination	Which make this happen
CMD + SHIFT + 3	Take a screenshot of the whole screen
CMD + SHIFT + 4With mouse and left mouse to drag a box. Mac OS 10.5 and later: While you drag the box: - Hold down the Spacebar to move selected area around. - Hold down the Shift key to change the size horizontally or vertically. - Hold Option for resizing from the center of the selection.	Taking a screenshot or capturing a specific area. This is the one I use the most.
CMD + SHIFT + 4 then press the Spacebar once.Now the screencapture X or Cross turns into a Camera icon. Now you can select a window, or item. Click the item or window with the left mouse button to hear the Camera sound	Taking a screen capture of a window or application window. This includes all the application detail.
Hold down the CTRL key while doing any of the above screen capture shortcuts.	This last one I never use. It places the screencapture onto your clipboard allowing you to paste it where you like. For me paste and images are very buggy. I prefer to drag the files into whatever I am working on. But for things like Microsoft Office or even blogging in Wordpress this is a handy tool to have.

We found that different versions of Mac OS X use different file formats for screencapture

We research the Mac OS X formats and produced this list of the differences that we know about.

• Mac OS X 10.2 or Jaguar uses the .jpg file format.
• Mac OS X 10.3 or Panther uses the .pdf file format.
• From the Mac OS X 10.4 or Tiger and onwards the .png file format is used.

From the Mac OS X 10.4 or Tiger and onwards the default file format could be change using the command line default we showed you above for setting the default location to save the screenshots.

In a terminal use the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_type

Replace the image_type with one of the following supported file types: pg, tiff, pdf, png or bmp

Then enter this command to fix the change and make a reset:

killall SystemUIServer

That rounds up the Mac OS X screencapture or screenshot tool. Please let us know how this tutorial works out and if you have any suggests please start a discussion.

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