In this day and age, social media has a large impact on games. There are thriving online communities surrounding any given release, be it the hottest new Intellectual Property or a game that’s been out since the 1980s. This isn’t even that new, what with old magazines like the now-defunct Nintendo Power and GamePro magazine featuring contests that relied on you taking a picture of your old CRT TV with an end game screen to win contests. Screenshots have been around forever, and everyone likes to be able to record their awesome performances in the games they love. The problem at hand, at least for PC gamers, is trying to find where the Steam screenshot folder resides. Who wouldn’t want to share their victory at the top of the scoreboard in Team Deathmatch with your gaming buddies?
Almost every platform has that functionality built in to allow you to post your fondest gaming memories on whatever social media site you want to. Some do this in a more streamlined way than others. The Playstation 4, for example, has a dedicated share button on its controller. Not every platform is created equally in this regard and some can be more taxing to use this functionality than others. This is a guide to help find your Steam screenshots folder, since this can be difficult for those who aren’t used to the exercise.
Since Steam is one of the largest game storefronts on PC, we thought it would be helpful to create a step by step guide on how to get your screenshots and share them with the world. One day Valve might update their Steam client to make this operation a little smoother, which will render this guide obsolete, but until that time comes we’re here to make your life a little easier. We want you to have fun and express yourself with as few obstacles in your way as possible. We’ll go over two methods for tracking down your screenshots so that way you don’t have to comb through menus and sub-folders until your eyes go blank and your will to live isn’t drained away.
How to Take a Screenshot on a Steam Game
In any given game on steam, you can click a hotkey (the default is F12, however, this can be changed to whatever is handier for your control setup) to take a screenshot of the current in-game screen. You can then publish this screenshot in your Steam profile or upload it on other social media platforms. That’s the easy part, but it may be difficult to actually find the screenshot after you’ve taken it, making the process of publishing them a bit more arduous than most would like. Fortunately, there is more than one way to find them, and since this is a guide we’ll help you figure out how to do this both ways, and you can use whichever method is easiest for you to remember, or whichever is more efficient for what you’re trying to use the screenshot for.
Finding Your Screenshots Folder Through the Steam Client
The first method to tracking down your screenshots is to use the screenshot manager in the Steam client menu. Step number one is to open your steam window. Next, move your cursor to the upper left corner of the screen. This is where the bulk of the various drop-down menus are located. Click on the “View” menu and the drop-down menu will appear with a list of options. The one you’ll be looking for is called “Screenshots”.
Once you’ve clicked on that you should be able to choose a game from the menu marked “Show” and review all the screenshots you’ve taken for that specific game, and you’ll have the option to upload a specific file or delete it on the right-hand corner of the screen, and on the left there will be the thumbnails of available pictures from the game that you’ve taken, with the options of selecting all of them, showing them on-disk, and you can also view your online library of screenshots from this screen as well. The On-disc option will allow you to access the screenshots directly through your hard drive.
Share Your Uploaded Screenshots
Once you’ve made your selections just hit the publish button and you should be able to share those screenshots directly on whatever platforms you’ve tied to your steam account, or if you don’t have your social media platform of choice tied to your steam account you can access the shots through your hard drive and copy-paste to your twitter or what have you.
If you are there to do some spring cleaning, all you need to do is select the desired number of screenshots you want to get rid of and click the delete button. This is by far the easiest way of interacting with your screenshots for any given game, but it is a tad limited if you want to do anything besides just sharing raw screenshots from the game you’re playing. What if you’re a content creator for a website or a YouTube channel? There is another way of getting to those juicy screenshots that has a bit more utility.
Finding Your Steam Screenshots Through Your File Explorer
The second method for managing your screenshots won’t require you to open your Steam account at all, but it is a bit more complicated. Let’s say you’re editing a video for YouTube, and you can’t open your Steam account while your video editing software is running at the same time. Most video editing software will require you to browse through folders to select the media you want to add. If you aren’t used to this, or if you’re used to looking in a folder you created especially for your projects, it can be a practice in frustration to go hunting through unknown folders just to find one thing.
To make this easier, and prevent an interruption in your workflow, we’ll go over the steps you’ll need to find your screenshots quickly, and avoid the annoyance. If you want to create a specific folder to house your important screenshots for editing videos, or projects in Photoshop or Krita, this will make it easier for you to find those files and move them to your work folder to avoid having to do it in the middle of projects as well. This method does take more time than just viewing through the Steam client, but it’s worth it if you want to do more with those screenshots.
Finding The Local Steam Screenshot Folder on Your Drive
As with any program installed on your computer, there is a subfolder where your screenshots are saved once you make them. This folder will be located on the drive that you have your Steam client installed to. The bulk of users will have their hard-disk set as the C drive, though if you have multiple hard drives in your rig, it may be different. From this point on, we’ll assume that the local disk that you install program files to is the C drive, just to make the guide easier to follow. Now your Steam account will have automatically created a folder to store each screenshot you’ve taken while playing.
To find the folder, you’ll need to open up your file explorer. This window can be accessed through either your taskbar at the bottom of your screen or through the main Windows menu. The taskbar icon will look like a manilla folder shape and a similar color, and at the bottom, it will have a tiny blue rectangle. Clicking that icon (if you have it pinned to your taskbar) will take you to the file explorer. If you aren’t sure if you’ve got the right taskbar icon, you can hover your cursor over the icon for a second or two and the text “File Explorer” will pop up.
If you’re looking for the file explorer option in the windows menu, once you’ve tapped the windows button on your keyboard, or clicked on the windows icon on the bottom left of your screen, you should see a list of programs as well as large icons for programs in the “at a glance” section. If you scroll down the list of programs on the left side of that menu, look for the folder labeled “Windows System” and it will give you another list of programs, continue scrolling down and you should see the “File Explorer” option. It’s right below the control panel option in that menu. Once you have the File Explorer open, click on the icon for your local hard drive, usually labeled “Windows C:” and this should bring up several more folders.
Locate the folder labeled “ProgramFiles (x86)” and click on that next. This should bring up yet another list of folders (I hope you are noticing a theme). Scroll down until you locate the folder labeled “Steam”, then click on the folder labeled “userdata” then locate the folder labeled with your Steam Id. Now that you’re in your Steam Id folder look for a folder labeled “760” and click on it. Then click on the folder labeled “remote”, and then click on the folder of the game you’re trying to get your saved screenshots from, and the very last folder you need to worry about clicking on is labeled “screenshots”.
This may seem like a more complicated way of finding the screenshot you’re looking for, but once you get the hang of it, finding it again won’t be nearly as difficult. It might feel a bit like playing with Russian nesting dolls, but another handy feature of Windows 10 is, the more you access a file folder, the more likely it will pop up in your file explorer under the heading “frequent folders” so you won’t have to go through this whole process every time you want to snag a screenshot from Steam. You could even create a shortcut to this folder.
How to Get Steam ID Number
Now, if you’ve navigated your way through the labyrinthine only to realize you don’t know your Steam Id, have no fear, we will show you how to find that information as well. To find your Steam Id, you’ll have to open your Steam client, then click on the view option on the top left of your screen, and then click on “settings”. Look for a box that says “Display Steam URL address when available” and then click the box to check it, and then save. Once you’ve saved your new settings go to your Steam Profile and click the “view profile” option.
The number located at the end of the URL is your Steam Id, and that’s the number you’re looking for when checking the folders located in the “user data” sub-folder. If you have trouble remembering your Steam Id, we recommend writing it down and keeping it where you can easily find it, or keep it on a text file that you can access from your desktop.
Now You Can Use All Of Your Steam Screenshots
Those are the two main methods for tracking down your screenshots taken through the Steam client, and hopefully, that will help you share your gaming experience with the wider community across social media. One method is obviously more straightforward than the other, but each has its own limitations, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with your screenshots. While it may be a bit of a pain to burrow through a veritable rabbit hole warren of sub-folders to get to your screenshots through the windows menu system, it does make it easier to edit those screenshots through other programs, and it also allows you to back up those screenshots to other drives instead of deleting them outright to save space.
It’s useful to know how to get to the folder on your local disk so you can use them to illustrate points or to spice up a game guide or video, and you can also churn out some memes if you caught something hilarious during your gameplay session. Accessing your screenshots through Steam itself is handy for just chiming in on the gaming conversation on whatever social media platform you enjoy the most. No matter what you do with them though, I hope this guide was helpful and entertaining. Now go and spread the video game love, in whatever capacity you want!