Where Do Screenshots Go on a Mac? How to Find Them and Change the Location

You pressed ⇧ ⌘ 4, heard the shutter sound, and now the screenshot is nowhere to be seen. It's almost always one of five things, and the fix takes seconds.

The default location: your Desktop

Out of the box, macOS saves every screenshot to the Desktop as a PNG file. The name starts with "Screenshot" followed by the date and time; older versions of macOS used "Screen Shot". Apple's screenshot shortcuts are:

Not on your Desktop? Check these five things

1. The save location was changed

Press ⇧ ⌘ 5 and click Options. Under Save to you'll see Desktop, Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Messages, Preview and Other Location, with a tick next to the current one. That's where your screenshots are going.

2. Screenshots are going to the clipboard

If Clipboard is ticked in those options, or you pressed Control as part of the shortcut, the screenshot was copied rather than saved. Nothing appears in Finder, but you can paste it with ⌘ V into a message, document or image editor. More in how to screenshot to the clipboard.

3. Your Desktop is grouped into Stacks

If the desktop tidies itself into piles, screenshots are collected into a Screenshots stack. Click the stack to expand it, or Control-click the desktop and turn off Use Stacks.

4. The Desktop is syncing to iCloud

With Desktop & Documents Folders turned on in iCloud Drive, your Desktop lives in iCloud. Screenshots are still there, but they may take a moment to appear on another Mac, and on a Mac with "Optimize Mac Storage" older ones may be stored only in iCloud until you open them.

5. You dragged the thumbnail somewhere

After you take a screenshot, a thumbnail floats in the corner for a few seconds. If you drag that thumbnail into a document, email or folder, the screenshot goes there instead of to the Desktop.

Find every screenshot on your Mac

• Spotlight: press ⌘ Space and type screenshot.
• Finder Recents: open Finder, click Recents and sort by Date Created.
• Finder search: in a Finder window press ⌘ F, choose This Mac and search for kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1 to list every file macOS marked as a screenshot, wherever it was saved.

Change where screenshots are saved

Using the Screenshot toolbar

1. Press ⇧ ⌘ 5.
2. Click Options.
3. Under Save to, choose a location, or Other Location… to pick any folder.

A dedicated folder such as Pictures/Screenshots keeps your Desktop clear. Create the folder first, then select it with Other Location.

Using Terminal

The same setting can be changed with two commands. Replace the path with your folder:

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

To see the current location, run defaults read com.apple.screencapture location. If it says the setting doesn't exist, you're on the default (the Desktop).

Stop screenshots getting lost in the first place

Screenshots are among the most useful things you copy: error messages, receipts, a slide from a call, a design you liked. But once you have hundreds, the file name is no help in finding one. Two ways to fix that:

• Search their text. macOS's Live Text lets you select text in an image, and Spotlight can find some text in images. See how to copy text from an image on a Mac.
• Keep them in a searchable history. EasyPaste watches the folder your screenshots are saved to, adds each new one to your clipboard history automatically, and reads the text in it on your Mac. Searching "invoice" or an error message finds the screenshot that contains it.

Know roughly what the screenshot said but not where it is? See how to find a screenshot by the text inside it, and how to organize screenshots so it doesn't happen again.

Capturing a whole page? See how to take a scrolling screenshot on Mac.