How to change where screenshots are saved on Mac

Press ⌘⇧5, click Options, and pick a folder under Save to (or Other Location…). Every screenshot you take after that lands there.

To change where screenshots are saved on a Mac, press ⌘⇧5 to open the Screenshot toolbar, click Options, and choose a location under Save to: one of the presets, or Other Location… to pick any folder. The choice sticks, so screenshots you take afterwards with ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4 or the toolbar go there until you change it again. Out of the box, macOS saves screenshots to the desktop as PNG files whose names start with “Screenshot” and the date and time.

The built-in way

Press ⌘⇧5. The Screenshot toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen.
Click Options.
Under Save to, pick a preset, or choose Other Location… and select (or create) a folder in the dialog.
Press Escape to close the toolbar without taking a shot.

A folder like Pictures/Screenshots is a good home: out of the desktop’s way and easy to find.

One preset deserves a warning: if Save to is set to Clipboard, screenshots aren’t saved as files at all. They sit on the clipboard waiting for a paste, and the next thing you copy replaces them. If your screenshots “stopped saving”, check this first.

From Terminal

The same setting lives in a preference you can set from Terminal, which is handy for setting up a new Mac or a script:

mkdir -p ~/Pictures/Screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots
killall SystemUIServer

defaults read com.apple.screencapture location shows the current folder. To go back to the desktop, run defaults delete com.apple.screencapture location and the killall line again. On some macOS versions the change applies without the killall line; running it doesn’t hurt.

What the built-in way can’t do

It’s one folder for everything. Every screenshot lands in the same flat folder, as a flat image. There are no per-project folders, and once you’ve marked one up with Markup and saved it, the arrows and boxes are part of the pixels for good.

With hypershot

hypershot keeps its own folder and doesn’t touch the macOS setting, so changing one doesn’t move the other. Every capture you take with hypershot, such as a region with ⌘⇧2, is saved automatically, with no save step, as an editable .hypercapture file in Pictures/hypershot.

To change that folder:

Click the hypershot icon in the menu bar and choose Settings.
Open the General tab.
Under Save directory, click Browse… and pick the folder.

New captures are saved there from then on. The preferences docs cover the rest of the General tab.

What lands in that folder is the thing a macOS screenshot isn’t: the capture with its annotations still editable and its frame history still scrubbable. Double-click one months later and the arrows can still be moved and the redactions resized. Finder shows each one as a real thumbnail once the Quick Look extension is on, so a folder of captures looks like a folder of images.

hypershot 2026-10-09 14-32-11.hypercapture

When you need a plain image file somewhere specific:

Export Image… (⌘E in the editor) asks for a location, a name and a format: PNG, JPEG, and WebP, HEIC, TIFF or BMP where macOS can write them. See Save to file.
Save As… on a card in the preview folder writes a PNG, JPEG or WebP wherever you choose, without opening the editor. See Capture history.
Reveal in Finder on a card takes you to the .hypercapture file itself.

And if you don’t want files piling up for one-off shots, set Settings → Captures → After capture to Only Copy: each capture goes straight to your clipboard, with a small pill you can click to open it in the editor if you change your mind.

Questions people ask

Why aren’t my screenshots on the desktop anymore?

Someone, possibly you months ago, changed Save to in the ⌘⇧5 options. Open them and look. If it says Clipboard, that’s why there are no files. If none of the shortcuts do anything at all, that’s a different problem: see what to do when screenshots stop working on Mac.

Can I save screenshots straight to iCloud Drive or Dropbox?

Yes. Choose Other Location… and pick a folder inside iCloud Drive or your Dropbox folder. hypershot’s Save directory can point at a synced folder the same way.

I use hypershot. Where’s the capture I just took?

In the preview folder in the corner of your screen (⌘⇧L shows it), and on disk in your save directory. Where do my screenshots go? walks through both.