Pro tip: Automatically save your Mac screenshots in iCloud

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JPG screenshot location
Screenshots can be saved anywhere, including iCloud.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bugOn your Mac, screenshots are pretty automatic. You hit the shortcut of your choice, and the resulting picture is saved to your desktop as a PNG image file. But what if you want a JPG? We’ve already covered that. How about saving the image to somewhere other than your desktop. Like iCloud maybe? Today we’ll see how to change the Mac’s default screenshot location to an iCloud folder.

How to change the default screenshot location on Mac

  1. Launch the Terminal app, located in Applications > Utilities.
  2. Type (or copy/paste) the following code into the Terminal window defaults write com.apple.screencapture location.
  3. Drag your new screenshot destination folder into the Terminal window. This will automatically paste its path into the window.
  4. Hit Return.

That’s it. You can pick any folder on your Mac as a destination for screenshots, including folders in iCloud Drive. This is a neat what top make those screenshots immediately available on all your iCloud-connected devices.

To change the screenshot location back to the default desktop, just repeat the same procedure, only with ~/Desktop as the path. Here’s the entire command for easy pasting:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop

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