Effectively Handling MacOS Screenshots

(cover image: midjourney)

Screenshots can get messy: If you copy to clipboard then you first have to hope where you want to put it accepts pasting, otherwise you’ll need to somehow get the clipboard saved to a file. And if you want to take multiple screenshots? You’ll have to grab, paste, grab, paste, switching context a bunch of time. And if you suddenly have need for a screenshot again 10 minutes later, then, well too bad it’s gone.

To simplify and streamline all that, here's a small tweak that’s easy to set up so screenshots fall into an easy and simple workflow:

• Open screenshot.app (e.g. SHIFT-CMD-5 shortcut, or via Spotlight/Launchpad)
  

• Click Options, then “Other Location”
  

• And then go to your Documents folder and create a new folder called “Screenshots” and select that as your screenshot location

• Then close screenshot.app (hit ESC)

• Open Finder, go to Documents, and drag the new Screenshots folder to your dock
  

• Then right-click the folder in the dock and select Sort by Date Added
  

Now all new screenshots will instantly appear at the top of that folder, which is easy to click on from any app and thus easy to drag screenshots in no matter which app you're in. Now it’s easy to take several screenshots in one go and trust they’ll all end up in that folder where they can be easily accessed later. And now they also persist, so you can refer back to them later. And they’re easy to modify by just clicking on them, since that opens Preview.

That's it. Just a tiny trick to reduce a small friction.