Screen capture not working correctly

I read online how to take a screen capture (by pressing Command+Shift+3) and it makes the picture noise but nothing shows up on my desktop? I've looked all over my computer but the pictures are nowhere to be found. Help?

Are you sure your screenies aren't being sent into the Documents folder in your user account, for example? Can you make a search for Picture 1.png or Picture 2.png and see if you can't find something?

Ok, so they were on my desktop but hidden! I went to Spotlight, searched Picture 1.png. I then right-clicked it, and clicked "Reveal in Finder" and then the icon appearead on my desktop. Strange!

I think it's time you emptied some caches.

Download MainMenu and run the Cleaning tasks, more specifically Clean User cache and Clean System cache - Deep Clean. Restart after both procedures. Don't worry if the startup seems to be slower than normal, it's simply the system is busy rebuilding its cache from scratch.

Get back to us and let us know how it goes.

...Why would I do that? My laptop is brand new. (as in bought it four hours ago)

I'd take MHC advice anyway.

You'll have a use for Main Menu at some point. I use the maintenance script feature everyday.

Congrats with the new Mac

Besides MHC's excellent advice, You might try repairing permissions. Sounds also like that could be causing it as I have never had a Mac with OSX that the screen shot pics did not show up on the desktop after maybe 1 second or so. I am sure MainMenu lets you do a repair of permissions like Onyx does. I don't care how new the machine is, something is wrong because that is not normal.

MHC i hate how i have to spread rep around... your advice was A+

Thanks ste6168.

jmeeter said:

...Why would I do that? My laptop is brand new. (as in bought it four hours ago)

Click to expand...

It could be many reasons. Maybe you downloaded stuff like crazy. Maybe you installed plenty of software and the system's cache got full. I really don't know what could be the real cause of this but in most cases, emptying the cache will fix weird behaviour like you saw. It's not something we do every minute, emptying cache but it does have its uses.

In your case a restart might have solved it too I guess. But I figured MainMenu is a nice piece of software to have around: it's useful and there's all sorts of things in it that will help keep your Mac healthy.

Ok, well now the files are showing up no problem (without installing the software)... So I have no idea what the problem was. I'll look into the program though. Thanks.

Can i just ask.. its a little off topic, but i downloaded MainMenu, it lookg great but im confused about some of the options and things it can do.. can anyone shed some light???

bennjiboi said:

Can i just ask.. its a little off topic, but i downloaded MainMenu, it lookg great but im confused about some of the options and things it can do.. can anyone shed some light???

Click to expand...

On your menu bar there should be a square with a plus sign in it and that is main menu. Click on that and all the things it can do drops down. main menu helps with the maintenance of your mac to keep it running smoothly. I don't know too much about it, but I'm sure later today some of our more experienced members can get some more info for ya!

bennjiboi said:

Can i just ask.. its a little off topic, but i downloaded MainMenu, it lookg great but im confused about some of the options and things it can do.. can anyone shed some light???

Click to expand...

In this thread here, we discussed a lot of the different tasks that MainMenu will perform. Take a look it might help answer some of your questions.

A few tasks weren't mentioned like the Execute Batch Tasks (it will run a bunch of default tasks one after the other - handy if you have a few weird problems with the Mac or think that you probably skipped over too many tasks lately), Disk Utility repairs permissions and can repair external disks (I wonder if it isn't simply using Apple's Disk Utility and commanding it from the app...), Finder section is to turn invisible files visible and turn them back to invisible and if the Finder hangs you can quit and relaunch it from MainMenu, and Other Tasks is stuff about logs, Dashboard, etc. that I haven't tried out yet.

Hope this helps.