Hide MacBook OS X Desktop Icons & Redirect Screenshots

A few days ago I was in a cleanup mode and I figure I wanted to move, delete , sort the files on my MacBook since I’m trying to have some kind of discipline of what I’m keeping and where I’m keeping it. After cleaning up the three major folders where I keep my files (Desktop, Documents and Downloads) I decided to:

• Hide Icons on the Desktop
• Redirect screenshots from desktop to a folder in the Downloads catalog

Both the above tasks can be taken care of with just a simple terminal command according to the below:

• Hide desktop icons by using the following command(s). I wrote all commands required in one line separated with a ;
  • echo “Let’s disable all icons on the desktop” ; echo ” ” ; /usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false; echo “Let’s restart Finder to make sure the icons are gone” ; /usr/bin/killall Finder ; echo “Now the desktop icons are gone….”
    • Running the command in a terminal window will give the following output
      
    • To enable Desktop icons again just run the following command:
      • /usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
• Redirect screenshots using the below terminal command. In this case I’ll redirect the screenshots to folder screenshots in the Downloads folder.
  • /usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/magander/Downloads/screenshots/
    you can use ~/Downloads/screenshots/ as well instead of the full path

Both commands were tested on macOS Sierra 10.12.6 but should work on other versions as well.