Where Bench saves screenshots locally on your Mac

You’ve been using Bench for a while, your library has hundreds of captures in it, and you’d like to know where the actual files live — to back them up, free up space, or just to feel less anxious about your data sitting in a place you can’t see.

Two paths

The macOS-native answer (Screenshot.app)

If you’d used ⌘⇧4 or ⌘⇧5 instead, your screenshots would land on the Desktop by default. You can change that in Screenshot.app:

1. Press ⌘⇧5 to open the Screenshot toolbar.
2. Click Options.
3. Under Save to, pick a folder — Desktop, Documents, Clipboard, or a custom location.

That’s the system-wide setting. Bench doesn’t touch it, so any native macOS screenshots will keep going there.

The Bench answer

Bench keeps captures inside the app’s Application Support folder, not on your Desktop. Here’s the path:

1. Open Finder.
2. From the menu bar, choose Go → Go to Folder… (or press ⌘⇧G).
3. Paste this and press Return:
   ~/Library/Application Support/com.generalsoftwarecorp.bench/captures/
4. You'll see a folder full of PNGs and MOVs, each named with a UUID — plus matching .edit.json sidecars.

What you’re looking at:

• The PNG or MOV is the untouched original capture. Annotations, blurs, crops — none of those are baked in.
• The .edit.json sidecar stores annotations, blurs, the crop rectangle, and canvas settings as data. That’s why every capture in Bench remains fully editable: nothing is flattened until you export.
• Thumbnails live in a separate thumbnails/ folder and are regenerated automatically if you delete them.

A few practical things:

• Backups: Time Machine includes ~/Library/Application Support/ by default, so your Bench library is already backed up if Time Machine is on.
• Moving captures: You can drag PNGs and MOVs out of this folder to anywhere you like. They’re regular files.
• Reclaiming space: The Library window inside Bench has a delete button for each capture — safer than nuking files in Finder, because it also clears the sidecars.
• Cloud uploads: Files you share via Bench Cloud are also on the server, but the local original always stays here. If you delete a bnch.sh link from your cloud library, the local file is untouched.

If you ever uninstall Bench and want to wipe everything, deleting that one folder cleans up your full capture history. The app’s preferences live next door in ~/Library/Preferences/.