Change default screenshot folder in Windows 8

Question

By default, the screenshots saved by pressing Windows + PrintScreen are stored in My Pictures/screenshots

How can I change this default screenshot saving location?

Answer 1

You can use Symlinks to replace that default location and use any other Folder in any drive as long as it is not a removable drive.

e.g. I want to use E:\UPLOADS\Screenshots folder as the Win+PrnScr destination folder.

So I proceed with the following steps:

1. Delete or rename the existing default folder Make sure that Screenshots folder doesn't exist inside your My Pictures folder.

2. Launch CMD as admin : Press Win+X there you will find an item option to launch Command Line with Admin privileges and write the following command.

mklink /D %userprofile%\Pictures\Screenshots "E:\UPLOADS\Screenshots\"

And that's it, now you can see your screenshots inside that folder.

Optionally, you might want to reset the screenshot counter with the following command:

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer /v ScreenshotIndex /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

[UPDATE]

Easier than the method above. Just right click the Screenshots folder and on its properties dialog window, switch to Location tab and Move its actual location to any other you like, it might be another hard drive, another partition or another computer in your network. You can also revert to the default location.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if this worked before Windows 8.1, but now if you move the "My Pictures/screenshots" folder, this changes the default screenshot saving location.