How to disable screenshot thumbnails in Mac OS X

Take a lot of screen­shots? New­er ver­sions of OS X now show a thumb­nail in the low­er-right cor­ner of the screen. While this can be use­ful for mak­ing quick edits, users who take screen­shots on a fre­quent basis find it annoyingS

How to Disable the Screenshot Thumbnails on a Mac

Fol­low these steps to dis­able screen­shot pre­view thumb­nails on new ver­sions of Mac OS X:

1. Press Command+Shift+5 on your key­board. The screen­shot util­i­ty will appear.
2. Click “Options”
3. Uncheck the option for screen­shot thumb­nails, “Show Float­ing Thumbnails”

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can also search for “screen​shots​.app” on your Mac to bring up the screen­shots tool. The screen­shot pre­views will now no longer appear when you turn off ‘Show Float­ing Thumb­nail’ in the Find­er. The screen­shots that have been snapped are cre­at­ed and shown to us almost instant­ly just like before!

How to Re-enable Screenshot Thumbnails

Changed your mind? Fol­low the same steps to re-enable screen­shot thumbnails:

Fol­low these steps to dis­able screen­shot pre­view thumb­nails on new ver­sions of Mac OS X:

1. Press Command+Shift+5 on your com­put­er key­board. Once again, the screen­shot util­i­ty will appear.
2. Click “Options”
3. Check the option for screen­shot thumbnails

You can enable and dis­able screen­shot options as often as you lke.

Why do screenshot thumbnails appear in the first place?

You might be won­der­ing: why show the thumb­nail at all? It seems like Apple decid­ed to trig­ger macOS’s built-in screen­shot edit­ing fea­ture with this par­tic­u­lar Mac OS X 10.14 Mojave update, which has been present since then and allows you crop your cap­tured images before they get saved on disk for eas­i­er view­ing. Plus there’s also an option to dis­card any­thing that does­n’t look great in order not have any more prob­lems later!

Bonus: How to change the folder where screenshots are stored

When stor­ing screen­shots on your com­put­er, many of us would like to keep them in their own fold­er instead of mov­ing the files around. This just keeps things neat and tidy on our desk­top! Over in the Screen­shot util­i­ty options you can choose ‘Oth­er Loca­tion..’ for where those pic­tures will go once saved. This is great if you want to keep things orga­nized. I take a lot of screen­shots and find my desk­top gets clut­tered in no time, so I keep every­thing in a fold­er called “Screen­shots.”