How I do Screenshots on macOS

I take a lot of screenshots on my phone and apparently 10% of the photos on my phone are screenshots. That translates to roughly more than 5000 screenshots in my iCloud Library. I can categorize those screenshots into two:
 1-  to save information in case I want to remember something later
 2- to share with others
Either way it's key that I can access them in a convenient way.

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 things to desktop is an ancient, dare I say boomer, way of saving things in a desktop environment. This instantly bothered me ever since I returned to using a mac as my default computer back in 2020 and 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 screenshot I am looking for but there is a very simple one action you can take to make it much better.

iCloud. As most Apple enthusiasts, 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 completely different workflow that works for you.