SteamOS is a very complete operating system. Unchangeable, but complete. Mainly to play, but you can do everything with it. The main view is the game mode, Big Picture if you are not on SteamOS, and in this mode you can take screenshots. The bad thing is that its use is not intuitive at all, and here we are going to explain how to take those screenshots in the Steam deck and how to share them without being limited to Steam.
The screenshots in game mode from the Steam Deck are made with the key combination Steam + R1. A small animation and a sound will inform us that we have taken the screenshot, but where are they? From the game mode it is easy to find them, but what happens if what we are looking for is to send them via Telegram or any other means? That is what we are going to explain here today.
Screenshots on the Steam Deck
As we have mentioned, the captures are made with a simple key combination, and we can view them if in game mode we press the key Steam and we move to «Multimedia».
Once in the "Multimedia" section, what we will see will be something like the header screenshot: a gallery with all the screenshots. The problem is that what the system proposed by Valve is Designed for use on Steam and only on Steam. If we stand on top of an image and press the button indicated below, which is the small one above the action buttons and the right stick and would be the hamburger button, we will see the available options. These are limited to Load, Delete or cancel. If we choose "Upload", we can upload it to Steam, and once shared we can both see them on any device and share them.
Once loaded, the options already change: we can edit the legend, the visibility, add it to favorites and add a Spoiler label, in addition to deleting them. What interests us is what appears above everything, that is, Share. But as we have mentioned, everything is in Steam: the options offered here are Steam Activity Feed, QR Code or send to a friend. The last option would allow us to send it to a Steam friend.
How to share them in the way we choose
If we want to remove them from Steam, Valve doesn't make it easy, but it doesn't make it impossible either. Captures taken from game mode are saved, at the time of writing this article, in this path:
~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/NUMERO_USUARIO/760/remote/
Inside there will be folders with numbers, in theory one per game or application. Inside these folders we will find a folder screenshots and inside the captures along with another folder with thumbnails.
What would be left is to take the catches that interest us and send them wherever we please.
You only have to be careful with one thing, and that is do not delete anything from those folders from desktop mode or the "Multimedia" section of game mode will show broken images. Even so, this has an easy solution: from the same game/Multimedia mode, we select the broken image and click delete. This also applies to completely eliminating captures that we no longer want.
As for captures in desktop mode, it is totally different. The desktop that Valve chose for the Steam Deck is Plasma, and although it has Show installed by default, there is no shortcut configured by default. If we want to take a screenshot we can launch Spectacle manually or go to System Preferences and configure a keyboard shortcut. By default, screenshots will be saved in the ~/Images/Screenshots folder.
Maybe it will be different in the future
It is possible, although not likely, that screenshot management will change in the future. If I don't see it as likely, it's because Steam is a platform and it has been shown that using others, like X, can end badly - tell Microsoft and Sony -. Also, accessing Dolphin and Telegram or another application from game mode... Valve will think "why fix what isn't broken?" And we can always share them as explained in the previous point.
UPDATED: The September 12 release of the Steam Deck client has changed the way screenshots are handled. It now supports saving, sharing, and other actions from within game mode.