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I was having the problem described in this question: Capturing screenshots on macOS Sierra is very slow. However, while searching I found Screenshot taking a very long time to appear on desktop first (particularly because I had skipped Sierra and upgraded to High Sierra) whose answers did not help me.

By further research, it seems clear that these are in fact the same problem — it is a Finder problem that can be triggered by the use of any sync software. Accordingly, I flagged the latter question suggesting that it be merged with the former.

However, I don't seem to have communicated the situation adequately using flags, so the new situation is worse — the latter question has been marked as duplicate, but not merged, so the existing answer mentioning iCloud as a possible cause will now be less prominent.

Therefore I am making this louder, public request: please merge Capturing screenshots on macOS Sierra is very slow and Screenshot taking a very long time to appear on desktop (or explain why this is not a good outcome).

(I can see it being arguably better to write a single answer covering both cases, since the ideal Stack Exchange question has comprehensive rather than partial answers, but I still think that merging is superior to not merging in this case.)

More history, not relevant to what I am requesting: The first flag I raised:

This is not a perfect duplicate of apple.stackexchange.com/questions/264463/… but I believe that merging these questions would be beneficial to being able to discover the multiple possible causes of this problem (e.g. mine was only mentioned in the answers to the other question, but this one showed up because I searched for "high sierra") – Kevin Reid 2 days ago helpful - Thanks. I’ve made sure to link the two questions. You can also help editing your post or answer to link here and explain the relevance.

I saw no edit or other action constituting "link[ing] the two questions", and I have no "post or answer" to edit on either question.

I then flagged it as duplicate, which was accepted, and then I flagged

This question should be merged with its duplicate, because the answers cover multiple causes of the same problem that might be applicable to different (this one mentions iCloud, and that one mentions Google Backup & Sync) – Kevin Reid 2 days ago helpful

but no action was taken.

I don't think that this is a situation that is extremely important, but I am particularly disturbed by the fact that the action I proposed was neither implemented nor rejected.

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  • Thanks for posting - let me see what I can see in the flag history. I personally do mark many flags as helpful when I don't make a change, so that's something that will certainly happen and I'm glad you explained the situation here.
    – bmike Mod
    Mar 1, 2018 at 18:49

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Initially I wasn't ready to merge all answers from this question:

And move them to this question:

I think it's best to keep them separate since one is High Sierra and deals with Apple reasons for the delay. The other deals with third party reasons. Also - both questions would need an edit.

If we end up with 5 or so linked questions - we can revisit if making a clean "canonical" question to hold all the answers is best - but at this point the close as duplicate seems to serve all interests well. I have bounced this across the moderation team in our chat window and the consensus today is to not merge the two posts you flagged.

The best outcome I can see would be to have someone, perhaps you Kevin ask the fundamental question - "How can I use fs_usage or another tool to measure and diagnose a delay of 10 seconds adding a file to the desktop of Mac OS?" That question could be narrowly framed - link to all the questions (merged or closed or open) that exist and then have an answer explaining how to measure the activity that lets anyone know which of the dozens of sync services is throttling IO.

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    "you wish that all answers from this question…get moved to this question": Yes. There are some answers on the duplicate which I don't think are particularly helpful, such as the one speculating that the screenshot location has changed, but I think that it would be best if they are all brought together in one list.
    – Kevin Reid
    Mar 1, 2018 at 19:07
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    It's been a week; any news?
    – Kevin Reid
    Mar 8, 2018 at 22:13
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    Hi @KevinReid after thinking it over - I prefer to keep them linked and not merged. I'll edit my post to explain my thinking.
    – bmike Mod
    Mar 11, 2018 at 17:46
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    Hm, I disagree. "Apple reasons" vs "third-party reasons" doesn't help the searcher, because they don't know what the reason is yet. What I needed when I was researching the problem was, ideally, an answer that said "Do you have any sync tools enabled, such as [list of software]" and then I (and both of the original askers, if the question had existed first) would have gotten exactly the info they needed. I suppose writing such a comprehensive answer is a perfectly good path forward...
    – Kevin Reid
    Mar 11, 2018 at 21:37
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    Sounds great @KevinReid - having good answers (and even better ones once we have a decent or good but narrow scope answer) is the ultimate reason for this site. Questions only exist as foils to get the great answers. Feel free to link here to your answer. I'm sure I'll find it +1 worthy.
    – bmike Mod
    Mar 12, 2018 at 1:14

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