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Mac OS X Screen Capture, Default Location and Default File Name

On my post titled “Mac OS X Screen Capture, Default Image Format and How To Change It“, a user called “frz” asks:

Anyone know how to change the default filename to the date and time the capture is made? Example: “10-12-09 10:53.png” instead of “Picture 1.png” as it is saved as default today.

That’s a really great question!

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to change the file name to the creation date and time within the screencapture app settings themselves. However, there is a good way to handle this – though it requires a couple extra steps to get it set up.

The method is to change the default location that the screencapture app saves files and to use an AppleScript Action attached to a folder to handle the file renaming as it’s created.

Ryan Todd wrote a great script back in November 2005 that works perfectly for this application. Download it (and give him thanks if you like it) here. It will rename the file in a year/month/day/hour/minute/second format (e.g. 20090203163543.jpg) and create a sub-folder it will be put in named with a year-month-day format (e.g. 2009-02-03).

Here’s what I suggest:

  1. Download and install Ryan Todd’s “renameToDateTimeAndMoveToDateFolder” script and install it in the _root/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ directory.
  2. Create a folder in a location such as your desktop or in your documents folder to receive screen captures. Name it something like “ScreenCaptures” or whatever works for you.
  3. Open terminal and change the default location that screencapture will save images by typing:
    defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder
    then type:
    killall SystemUIServer
  4. Go to your new “ScreenCaptures” folder in the Finder and ctrl-click or right-click on it and select More > Enable Folder Actions
  5. Ctrl-click or right-click on the folder again and select More > Attach Folder Actions then navigate to and select the renameToDateTimeAndMoveToDateFolder.scpt to attach it to the folder

That’s it!

Now, every time you use screencapture, the image will be saved to that folder, the AppleScript Action will run and  your image will be renamed with the creation date/timestamp and saved into a sub-folder with the current day’s date!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under General, Gizmos, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

23 Responses to “Mac OS X Screen Capture, Default Location and Default File Name”

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  2. March 7th, 2009 at 4:39 pm

    fahrrad says:

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  3. March 7th, 2009 at 4:45 pm

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  5. April 1st, 2009 at 1:21 pm

    Enable Folder Action to automatically rename screen capture files | En.dogeno.us says:

    [...] that the screen capture file is named as “Picture 1.png” etc. Based on instruction on here and the original AppleScript, I find the [...]

  6. April 1st, 2009 at 8:31 pm

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    JaneRadriges says:

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  14. July 19th, 2009 at 11:13 pm

    Jim-Jimm says:

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  15. July 21st, 2009 at 4:09 pm

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  16. July 23rd, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    EmilieOttmanns says:

    Hey, ok, I get it, I guess – but does this really work?

  17. July 26th, 2009 at 8:08 pm

    dankeydoo says:

    How long has this forum been here?

    Very helpful.

    Dankeydoo

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