Auto-Tagging
Updated
How Tagging Works
When Recall indexes a screenshot it runs two classification passes:
- Apple Vision image classification —
VNClassifyImageRequestassigns visual labels (e.g. “nature”, “document”, “map”) with a confidence threshold of 70%. - OCR text heuristics — the extracted text is scanned for patterns that identify specific screenshot types.
The results are merged, deduplicated, and stored as a comma-separated tag list. Tags appear as sidebar filters and as chips in the detail panel.
Built-In Tags
| Tag | How it’s detected |
|---|---|
code | OCR text contains func, class, struct, let, var, import, return, =>, def, or #include |
receipt | OCR text contains a dollar amount pattern (e.g. $49, $ 9.99) |
web | OCR text contains http:// or https:// |
error | OCR text contains error: or exception (case-insensitive) |
map | OCR text contains latitude, longitude, directions, navigate, or street view |
Additional tags may appear from Apple Vision’s visual classification — for example document, food, or nature.
Browsing by Tag
The AUTO TAGS section of the sidebar shows every tag present in your library with a count. Click any tag to filter the gallery to only screenshots with that tag.
To clear the filter, click All Screenshots at the top of the sidebar.
Source App Detection
In addition to content tags, Recall identifies which app produced each screenshot. It first reads the kMDItemCreator Spotlight attribute from the file’s metadata, then falls back to filename patterns for standard macOS screenshots (e.g. Screenshot 2026-04-30 at 10.23.45.png).
Source apps appear in the SOURCE APPS section of the sidebar. Clicking an app filters the gallery to only screenshots from that app.
Uncategorised Screenshots
Screenshots with no tags appear under Uncategorised in the sidebar. This is useful for reviewing images that haven’t been classified yet (for example, very new files whose Vision processing is still in progress) or images whose content Vision couldn’t identify.