A Better Screenshot Workflow on macOS

Screenshots are a big deal these days—whether it's capturing a funny meme, saving a quick reference, or documenting a process. They’ve become an essential part of how we interact with our devices, and they’re everywhere. In fact, 10% of the photos on my phone are screenshots! Most of those screenshots are taken either

to save information in case I want to remember something later or
to share them with others.

Either way, it is crucial to be able to swiftly find the screenshot I am looking for. I don’t think I would be taking half as many screenshots on my phone if the screenshots were hard to find. This brings us to macOS where the default screenshot workflow is not that useful.

For starters, macOS defaults to saving screenshots on desktop. Saving anything to desktop is an ancient, dare I say "boomer", way of saving things in a desktop environment. This instantly bothered me when I returned to using a mac as my main computer back in 2020. Finding an initial solution was as simple as googling "how to change default screenshot save location on macOS". I created a Screenshots folder under my user directory and all screenshots got saved to there. This solved the organization aspect of the problem and made it a tad easier to find the screenshots I am looking for but there is one more thing you can do to make screenshots it much better.

iCloud is the last bit of magic I introduce to the workflow

As most people, I have a love and hate relationship with iCloud but I found that, there is one thing it does well. It syncs screenshots saved on a Mac remarkably quickly to iCloud. So simply moving the Screenshots folder that I previously created on my user directory to iCloud meant that I can access those screenshots on any Apple device mere seconds after I took them on my Mac.
I have used this method extensively for saving important tidbits from lecture scripts/videos to my Goodnotes notebooks on my iPad. You can easily use it with any program that supports importing files from the Files app. You can also find a different workflow that works for you.