How-To

Move the Snagit Library to a Second HDD Using Symlinks

By Austin

Last Updated on August 11, 2021

One of my favorite screenshot programs is Snagit, and in large part because of its capture library system. However, if you want to move the screenshot library it takes a little bit of work.

If you’re someone that takes a lot of screenshots, you probably own at least one version of Snagit. And if you’re like me, what started out as a small archive of only a few shots, quickly transformed into a 20GB+ library. That’s fine and all, but by default, the Snagit capture library is stored in your local AppData folder and there is no setting to change this. When you’re running a small SSD as your primary drive, you can see how this might be a problem. To work around Techsmith’s feature indiscretion, you can move the library to a second drive and then use symbolic links to trick Snagit into thinking it’s still there.

Get Started with Snagit and its Library for Symlinks

The first thing you should do is completely exit out of Snagit (and the editor). This will let you modify the capture library, and also ensure that you don’t lose any data from it.

Next, copy over the library to the location you want it. A robocopy with the proper parameters should move everything over while maintaining security settings. To do this open up the command prompt and type in the following command:

robocopy C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\Techsmith G:\Destination /e /secfix /copyall /b /sl /xj

Obviously, change the “G:\Destination” part to match up with the path of where you are moving the Snagit library too, and the username to match up with your Windows username.

You can open the command prompt by typing “cmd.exe” into the Windows Search box.

Once the copy is done, check the destination and make sure everything is copied over properly.

Now open up the %AppData%\local\ folder containing the original files and delete the TechSmith folder.

Now open up CMD again, this time as an administrator.

The command this time around will create the symbolic link. It’s similar to the robocopy:

mklink C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\TechSmith G:\Destination

That’s all there is to it. Now you can open Snagit back up and it won’t even know that you moved the library to an entirely different drive. Enjoy!