Search the Text Inside Your Screenshots on Mac
Recall uses on-device OCR to make every screenshot on your Mac full-text searchable. Find any error message, code snippet, or receipt in seconds.
You take a screenshot of an error message. Two weeks later you need to look it up. You remember it happened — but what was the exact wording? You scroll through hundreds of thumbnails, squinting at each one, until you give up and just reproduce the error from scratch.
This is a solved problem. It just hasn’t been solved well on Mac yet.
The Problem with Screenshot Libraries
macOS keeps your screenshots. Finder can show them as thumbnails. Spotlight can find them by filename and date. But none of that helps when what you remember is the content — a specific word, a URL, a dollar amount, a function name.
The text sitting inside those screenshots is completely invisible to every standard search tool.
What Recall Does
Recall watches your Desktop and Screenshots folder. Every time a new PNG or JPG appears, it runs Apple Vision’s OCR engine on it and stores the extracted text in a local full-text search index. The whole process takes a few seconds per image and happens entirely on your Mac.
Once indexed, your screenshot library becomes searchable by its content.
- Type
TypeErrorand every screenshot containing that error appears. - Type
stripe.comand every Stripe receipt or page you captured shows up. - Type
func viewDidLoadand you get back the Xcode screenshot you needed.
The search bar uses FTS5 prefix matching, so partial words work too. You don’t need to remember the exact phrase.
Smart Tagging Without Any Manual Work
Beyond full-text search, Recall automatically classifies screenshots into categories using a combination of Apple Vision image classification and text pattern matching.
Screenshots that contain code keywords (func, class, let, import, and so on) are tagged code. Screenshots with dollar amounts become receipt. Screenshots with URLs become web. Error messages become error. The sidebar shows each tag with a count so you can filter by category in a single click.
Recall also reads macOS Spotlight metadata to identify which app produced each screenshot. Your Terminal screenshots, Xcode screenshots, and Safari screenshots each get their own sidebar section.
Completely Private
Every part of Recall — OCR, classification, storage — runs on your Mac. Nothing is sent to a server. There’s no account, no subscription, no analytics. Your screenshots stay yours.
The database lives at ~/Library/Application Support/com.kwilio.recall/recall.sqlite on your own machine. You can open it with any SQLite browser if you want to see exactly what’s stored.
Try It
Recall is free on the Mac App Store.
Download on the App StoreOnce installed, it registers as a login item so it’s always running. Drop a screenshot on your Desktop and it’ll be searchable within seconds.