How to customize the save location of COSMIC Screenshot ?

Tutorial Jul 6, 2025

COSMIC Screenshot only allows saving images to ~/Documents or ~/Pictures :

The COSMIC Screenshot toolbar containing a dropdown showing "Save to Clipboard", "Save to Pictures", "Save to Documents".
The COSMIC Screenshot toolbar

Customizing the location has been requested at pop-os/cosmic-screenshot@github.com#15 a year ago, but isn't becoming a thing yet.

However, in the meantime, there is a workaround :

#!/bin/bash

MONITOR_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"

DEST_DIR="$HOME/Pictures/Screenshots/"

PATTERN="Screenshot_*.png"

inotifywait -m -e create -e moved_to --format "%f" "$MONITOR_DIR" | while read FILE
do
   if [[ "$FILE" == $PATTERN ]]
   then
       mv "$MONITOR_DIR/$FILE" "$DEST_DIR/"
   fi
done

Bash script automatically moving Screenshot_*.png files to ~/Pictures/Screenshots.

Run this at startup (for example using @reboot bash /path/to/move_screenshots.sh in crontab) and your screenshots will now be systematically moved instantly to the right place.


Fun fact : the abovementioned Bash code was AI-generated (at chat.mistral.ai).

Tags

KaKi87

26yo French web dev & tech enthusiast.