How to Find All Screen Shots on Mac with a Search Trick

How to Find All Screen Shots on Mac with a Search Trick

Have you ever wanted to quickly find every screen shot you have on a Mac? With a little-known search trick, you can easily list every single screen shot file on Mac OS. Going further, you can also search by names in screen shots, types, and dates as well, all by using the Mac Finder search or Spotlight search functions with a particular search parameter. This is a great trick if you have screenshots tucked all over the place on the Mac and buried throughout various folders and directories. Sure, by default screenshots will appear on the user Desktop, but that can be and over time they are likely to be moved around as other files are anyway, which is when this search tip becomes particularly handy. You can activate the screen shot search from either Spotlight or the Finder search, however the Finder search is likely more useful since you will see more data beyond the small search query return limit in Spotlight. Well show you who to use either method for finding all screenshots on a Mac. Starting with the Finder based Search approach to discover all screen shots: Note the screen shot search syntax must appear exactly as kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1, including exact casing. You can also use kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1 as a search parameter in Spotlight on the Mac. Spotlight also allows you to search screenshots but add a name, the syntax for such a search in Spotlight would look something like: Replacing ExampleName with the term within file names you wish to search screenshot file types for. You can also use the kind: jpeg or kind: png if you want to further narrow down the file format, which can be helpful if you converted files yourself or if you at some point. There are many to use on the Mac as well, but this one is particularly useful to those of us who have and maintain many screen shots for whatever reason. By the way, if you find yourself using this search parameter often to narrow down screenshots on your Mac, you might want to save the search as a smart folder so that contents of screen shot files can be easily retrieved at any time, a bit like how the works. The smart folder trick can make it so is less important, though if you dont want them cluttering a desktop you may still wish to do so. The syntax kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1 is a bit complex and not exactly easy to remember, but perhaps a future version of MacOS and spotlight will add a kind: screenshot parameter as a search function, which currently does not exist. In the meantime, try to remember kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1 instead, or save the search and reference it when needed. This great screenshot search trick was pointed out on Twitter by , so cheers to them for the find!