How to change the format and location of the screenshots on your Mac

One of the things I miss when I use Windows versus Mac is the ease with which they can take screenshots. Yes, I know, with that Print Screen button called get the same thing, but having to walk exporting it, unless we use a third party application, nothing is never comfortable. For those who do not know, in OS X to perform a screen capture of your Mac is as simple as:

• Cmd + Shift +3: It captures the whole screen, without distinction, as it's before us at that time.
• Cmd + Shift +4: It captures only the area that we select with the mouse.
• Cmd + Shit + Space: It captures the whole window we point out and that will be highlighted in blue to identify it.

By default these are saved on the desktop and png format, but it may be that we want to change these settings for any reason, in one case because we are not interested but another png format and the second from appearing on the desktop, not to unnecessarily fill dirt or for example if we are to take many consecutive catches.

It's a trick that some of the most experienced users are already old but to some it may be useful. To change the format just have to open the terminal and write to the following:

jpg type defaults write com.apple.screencapture

And then

killall SystemUIServer

Not only can we change them to jpg but supports a wide variety of them, here the parameter list must change:

• PNG: Portable Network Graphic
• pdf: Portable Document Format
• jpg: Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)
• TIF: Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)
• gif: Graphics Interchange Format
• pct: Macintosh QuickDraw Picture (PICT)
• BMP: Microsoft Windows Bitmap
• SGI: Silicon Graphics
• TGA: Truevision Targa
• jp2: JPEG 2000

Now What if in addition to or instead we want to change the specific location of the catch saved? With another simple terminal command we can.

com.apple.screencapture location defaults write ~ / Pictures

That would change the location of the Desktop to the images folder, if we only have to replace another ~ / Pictures by ~ / location desired and ready for the changes to take effect immediately as in the previous case we can do well by logging or with the command:

killall SystemUIServer

And that's it, I always default I have it on the desktop but instead I am interested in having it in jpg, you can see that it requires only a few commands and fixed.