Where did my screen shots go?

In case anyone else is asking this same question. The default location is your desktop, but you may have intentionally changed that somehow. Anyway to reset as the desktop or to set to a preferred location follow the steps found in this post How to Change Screenshot Save Location

Nov 15, 2017

This is very interesting, Hector. Do you call where you read "Go to Finder, All My Files, and type in Search bar "screen shots". They should all come up there." --- from somebody else's prior answer, or in a help file?

I followed this suggestion to experiment, then looked at the search results window (Searching "This Mac" Finder window) and tried a new screenshot: It showed up there immediately... and yet, not on my Desktop.

So I then opened two Finder windows side-by-side:

Search Results window for "Screenshot" ----- and ---- Desktop Finder window,

then created a new screenshot:

The new screenshot showed up almost instantly in Search results window --- but it took 27 seconds before it appeared in the Desktop Finder window. Same time-gap in several more tests. This time gap is very odd. Can anyone comment on what may be happening here?

In addition, I tried the suggestion made in Jan 26, 2015 by designing diva

which seemed promising...

(same screen in 2017)

I unchecked "Copy picture..."

and the first new screenshot I tried showed up instantly, as "normal" display behavior. But not my subsequent screenshots... And based on various user replies above, this Preference change worked for some people and not others.

I know this is waaay after the fact, but I had this issue also. My solution was to go to my system preferences, select the keyboard, then shortcuts, then in the left column select screen shots. All 4 boxes were selected (the default), I UNselected "Copy picture of screen to the clipboard," as well as UNselected "Copy picture of selected area to the clipboard." I left the other 2 boxes selected. Closed the window, and tried again. The image showed up on my desktop. Yay!

Artichoke25 wrote:

Just for the record, none of the solutions proposed worked, but I did find the screenshots in my Dropbox. Go figure.

That means at some point you agreed to let Dropbox store your screen shots. It's an option they started offering. You might not remember clicking "OK" when they asked you if you wanted them to do that. If you want screenshots to go back to the default OS X location, open your Dropbox prefs and turn it off.

Thanks so much.

Launch the Terminal app in /Utlities, copy & paste in this one-liner into the window that pops up, and hit the return key. It'll come back with the current location for screencapture's screenshots.

defaults read com.apple.screencapture location

Open a Finder window, in list view, for your Desktop. Sometimes files can be hidden under other files or offscreen. The desktop is the default location and it is not a problem if you get that command line response. I don't have that defaults setting either but my screen shots work fine.

I just ran into the same problem, and I will try to be as useful as possible. TLDR: you are missing a file in your preferences folder.

I created the problem by deleting things from my preferences folder (Macintosh HD/users/[my name]/library/preferences). I backed up the preferences folder before deleting because I intuited that some issue would definitely arise when I play with things I know nothing about, and then I deleted them all. Restarted the computer bc trash wouldn't empty. You and everyone else should not do this. Anyways, when I couldnt screenshot (same reason as you guys, no permission) I put the files back into my preferences folder from my hard drive and it worked again.

After extensive googling I found that the screencapture file should look like this:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist

I still dont have that file, but my screen captures do work.

I know that all was super not-useful to almost everyone who is having this problem because who backs up their preferences? More importantly, who deletes their preferences? I had my reasons.

The (maybe?) useful bit:

I sorted the files in my preferences folder by "date added" (so as to see only the files that were added back in out of the 500 something), and there are 6 files that potentially fixed my screenshot issue. Now I know nothing about things generally, but I assume that the hidden ones called ".DS_Store" and ".GlobalPreferences.plist" don't count. Which means if you had the same screenshot issue, you are probably missing one of the other four.

The other four "new" files are:

- com.google.Keystone.Agent.plist

- com.apple.systempreferences.plist

- com.apple.finder.plist

- MobileMeAccounts.plist

Thats all I got. Don't ask me how my system functioned at all without the finder fie or the systempreferences file, thats way out of my scope. IDK if thats even the program file. Also, maybe the computer thinks the "date added" is the original date and none of these files matter at all. BUT I am positive that it was a preference that I was missing. I did nothing else to stop it from working, and once broken, no other steps were taken to make it work again.

Alternatively, http://www.maclife.com/article/columns/terminal_101_changing_screenshot_capture_ location

"Go to Finder, All My Files, and type in Search bar "screen shots". They should all come up there."

What I did before I read that (didn't try it, but it appears to work) is rearrange the desktop icons (right-click desktop>>sort by>>name (I'm sure you can choose any selection on the final step)... command+control+shift+3 and it rearranged itself to accommodate the new file 🙂

🙂 THIS SOLUTION WORKED GREAT! Recently - for some reason - my new screen shots began disappearing. The only way I could find them was to open the Desktop file, then click on the image I'd just taken. THEN it would appear on the Desktop. Pretty annoying, to say the least.

Found this fix, tried it, and it worked - hooray! Thank you so much!

I tried using Diva's suggestion, but this didn't work for me. I was using it this morning; why wasn't it working this afternoon?

I found that as I looked at all the screenshots in Desktop, I found the ones I had just done tucked in the middle instead of at the end, like I expected, since that's the way they always are. As I examined the file name more closely, I discovered that the timestamp in the filename uses a 12 hr clock (AM/PM) rather than 24 hr clock. So the ones I did at 8 AM came after the ones I did at 2 PM.

Anyone else reading this might look at it that way, or sort their folder by date added rather than by name, like mine.

Just for the record, none of the solutions proposed worked, but I did find the screenshots in my Dropbox. Go figure.

Thanks for the help everyone.

Don't forget the rules of the road: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6081

This worked perfectly for me, too! Thank you! For weeks I hadn't been able to find where my screen shots were going; now they are back on the desktop (the new ones, that is; still remains a mystery where all the past ones went)