Stop the Screenshot Preview Thumbnail on Mac

The little screenshot preview that slides into the bottom-right corner is meant to be helpful, but if you never click it, it's just a flash of motion that keeps pulling your eye away from what you were doing. You can switch it off permanently in about ten seconds. macOS remembers the choice, so the corner stays quiet from then on across every screenshot shortcut.

The fastest way: the Screenshot toolbar

Apple keeps this setting inside the on-screen capture toolbar, not in System Settings — which is why it's easy to miss.

1. Press Shift+Cmd+5. The capture toolbar appears along the bottom of the screen.
2. Click Options in that toolbar.
3. In the menu that opens, uncheck Show Floating Thumbnail (it sits near the bottom, under the save-location choices).
4. Press Esc to dismiss the toolbar. You're done.

The setting is a system preference, not a per-session choice — it survives logout and restart, and it applies whether you use Shift+Cmd+3 for the full screen, Shift+Cmd+4 for a region, or the toolbar itself. This is true on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia alike.

Why it interrupts more than it helps

The preview lingers for roughly five seconds, floating on top of every window, before it fades and the file is written to disk. During those seconds it animates into place and softly pulses — visual noise that's fine once but wearing when you take a dozen shots an hour. Removing it doesn't remove any capability: the file still saves, still opens in Preview, and Markup is still a double-click away. You lose only the interruption.

If you sometimes do want to drag a shot straight from the corner into an email, leave the setting on and just ignore the preview when you don't need it — but most people who go looking for this setting have already decided the corner should stay empty.

The Terminal equivalent

Prefer to set it from the command line, or want it in a setup script? The same preference is one defaults write:

# Stop the preview thumbnail appearing
defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-thumbnail -bool false
killall SystemUIServer

Restarting SystemUIServer applies it immediately — no logout needed. Changed your mind later? Reverse it with:

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

More corners of the screenshot toolbar

The same Options menu holds a few other quiet time-savers. If a lingering preview was your complaint, the built-in timer and remembered selection are worth a look too — see these lesser-known Mac screenshot tricks for the rest of what that toolbar can do.