Stop the Screenshot Thumbnail Getting in the Way

The floating screenshot thumbnail always parks in the same spot — the bottom-right corner — and sits on top of everything for about five seconds. If the thing you need to capture next lives in that corner (a toast notification, a status badge, a chat bubble, a floating video), the preview from your last shot lands right on top of it. Turn the thumbnail off and the corner stays clear for every capture.

Why the corner keeps getting blocked

macOS anchors the preview to the bottom-right and floats it above all windows, so it's immune to whatever you do underneath. That's a problem in a few common cases:

• Capturing a sequence of notification banners or a Do Not Disturb toast, which also appear near that corner.
• Documenting a floating player, picture-in-picture window, or a widget you've parked at the bottom-right.
• Shooting a chat or support widget that opens from the lower-right of a web app.
• Any back-to-back capture where the previous preview hasn't faded before you frame the next one.

You can technically swipe the preview off-screen to dismiss it each time, but doing that between every shot is exactly the interruption you're trying to avoid.

Clear the corner permanently

1. Press Shift+Cmd+5 to open the capture toolbar.
2. Click Options.
3. Uncheck Show Floating Thumbnail.

From now on, captures save straight to disk and nothing hovers over the bottom-right. The setting applies to every screenshot shortcut and holds across restarts on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. Re-tick the box any time you want the preview back.

Or flip it in Terminal

# Keep the bottom-right corner clear after every capture
defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-thumbnail -bool false
killall SystemUIServer

To restore the floating preview later:

# Bring the corner preview back
defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-thumbnail -bool true
killall SystemUIServer

The killall SystemUIServer step refreshes the screenshot interface so the change is live at once — no logout, no restart.

One more corner-clearing tip

If it's not the preview but your desktop clutter poking into shots, you can hide every desktop icon before a capture too. Between a clear corner and a clean backdrop, the frame is entirely yours.

Capturing a corner element cleanly

When the thing you're documenting is a single window rather than a region, macOS has a dedicated mode that grabs just that window with no background bleed. See how to screenshot a single window on Mac for the cleanest way to isolate corner UI.