Screenshots take a long time to appear on the desktop

Hello

USER SPECIFIC ISSUE: Any kind of screenshot, command-3, command-shift-4-space, command-shift-4-drag-and-click appear to take about 10 seconds before becoming visible on the desktop as an icon. command-control-shift-4 combination are instantly available from the clipboard for pasting.

I have not tried the 'ls' command from the terminal to understand if the files are there sooner but I will do this and report back

I've been having this issue for a few months and I finally decided to ask the community why this might be happening. Before coming here I did some research and the issue I am reporting doesn't appear to be isolated to any one version of MacOS. In fact it was reported under versions as early as 10.8. Currently the affected user account is running 10.13.4.

From what I've read on this issue, it could be related to cloud services like google's or dropbox's intervening temporarily as per their settings. I've not yet taken a look at these services running on my Mac but I turn them off temporarily to understand if they might be the cause. I will try SafeBoot first however.

FYI: I noticed another topic with the same question but I could not add a comment to it as that discussion appears to be closed.

Whatever troubleshooting/isolation steps I try will be reported back here. In the meantime if someone does know a highly potential cause for this I would be obliged if they could chime back.

Troubleshooting steps to perform:

Safeboot

'ls' command to verify if screenshots are there but only icon is delayed from appearing on the desktop

Turn off 3rd party cloud services as an isolation step

Kind regards

—Alex