If you take as many screenshots as I do, you may have run into this problem. Typically when taking a screenshot, I want to share it immediately and the easiest way to do that is to paste it to whichever document or chat I took the screenshot for. I could use ^⇧⌘4 to copy the image directly, but then I wouldn’t have a copy to refer back to later. My oddball needs required a custom solution.

Step 1:

Pop open Terminal and paste in the following command replacing the path with your own desired screenshot location. The default is the desktop but I prefer to keep my desktop clean.

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

This alters the location where your screenshots are saved.

Step 2:

Open Finder and navigate over to the folder you’ll now be saving screenshots. Right click on the folder and in the context menu click Services>Folder Actions Setup…

Step 3:

In the window that should have just popped up, select “add” and then “Edit Script” in the lower right hand corner.

Step 4:

A default script will pop up. All the default does is let you know when a new item has been placed in your folder of choice. That’s pretty lame so we’re going to replace it with the following.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items set the clipboard to (read (last item of added_items) as TIFF picture) end adding folder items to

The whole thing should look something like this.

Go ahead and save and you’re good to go!