Search your screenshots by what was in them.
Take a screenshot the way you always do. Stilou reads it on your Mac and files it, so months later you can ask for "the pricing table from that competitor deck" and actually get it back.
Stilou reads every screenshot you take on your Mac and indexes what is inside it, so you can find it later by content — "that pricing table" — instead of by filename or date. The reading happens on-device, on shots you took deliberately. There is no background screen recording, and the index is a file on your own disk.
Can you search screenshots on a Mac?
Partly, and further than most people realise. macOS runs Live Text over images, which means you can often open a screenshot in Preview or Quick Look, select the text inside it, and copy it out. Spotlight indexes some of that text too, so searching for an exact phrase you know was on the screen does sometimes surface the right PNG. Photos does the same for images in your library.
It stops there, and the gap is wide. Live Text needs the words to be crisp and the layout to be simple. Spotlight wants the exact string, which is precisely what you have forgotten — you remember a pricing table with three columns and a red badge, not the phrase "Business — £48 per seat". Nothing understands that a screenshot is a chart, or a Figma frame, or an error dialog. And the file is called Screenshot 2026-03-11 at 14.22.07.png, which tells you when you pressed the key and nothing else about why.
So the actual state of screenshot search on a Mac is: the text is sometimes findable, the meaning never is, and everyone copes the same way — scrolling the Desktop folder by thumbnail, in reverse chronological order, hoping to recognise it. For a folder with four thousand images in it, that is not a search strategy. It is archaeology.
Stilou reads each capture as it arrives — the text in it, what kind of thing it is, what it appears to be about — and turns it into a dot in your local brain, linked to the people and projects it mentions. Which means you can ask for it the way you remember it. "The error from the deploy last week." "That competitor's pricing." "The chart Maria sent." It comes back with the shot, and with everything else from around that moment, because a screenshot is rarely the only thing that happened.
How to make your Mac screenshots searchable
There is no new capture tool to learn. You keep the keys you already use.
- Take a screenshot the way you always do⌘⇧4 for a region, ⌘⇧3 for the whole screen, ⌘⇧5 for the panel, or whatever capture app you already prefer. Stilou does not replace the shutter, it picks up what comes out of it.
- Let Stilou read itThe shot is read on your Mac within a few seconds — the text inside it, the kind of thing it is, the people and projects it refers to. You do not tag it, rename it, or file it anywhere. That is the entire point.
- Ask for it later, in your own wordsPress ⌥Space and describe what you remember: "the pricing table from that deck", "the error dialog from Tuesday", "the chart with the red line". Exact wording is not required, because the index is built on meaning as well as text.
- Open it, or take the text outThe match comes back with the image and the text it contained, ready to copy — plus what else was going on around it, since the screenshot is linked to the thread, call or note it belongs with.
Tip. The best time to start is now rather than when you next need something, because the index only covers what it has seen. A month of ordinary screenshotting is usually the point at which people stop opening the Desktop folder at all.
What an indexed screenshot folder gets you
Every shot becomes text and meaning.
Words are extracted, and so is the gist — that this is a pricing page, an error, a chart, a chat thread. Searching for a concept works even when you cannot remember a single exact word that was on the screen.
"That pricing table" is a valid query.
You describe what you remember rather than reciting a string. Approximate memories are the normal kind, and the index is built to take them.
No folders, no tags, no renaming.
The organising happens because the content is understood, not because you maintained a system. Nobody has ever kept a screenshot taxonomy alive for more than three weeks.
A screenshot arrives with its context.
Each capture is a dot in your local brain, connected to the people, projects and conversations around it. Find the shot and you find the thread it came from, which is usually what you actually wanted.
The reading is on-device.
In Private mode, screenshots are read locally and nothing is uploaded. Images of your work, your customers' data and your half-finished designs stay on the machine they were taken on.
Nothing is captured on its own.
Stilou reads the screenshots you deliberately take. There is no continuous screen recording, no timeline of your day, and no capture happening while you are not looking.
Stilou vs the default Mac screenshot workflow vs CleanShot X
One of these is free and already installed, and one of them is the best capture tool on the platform. Neither is trying to solve finding.
| Stilou | macOS + Finder | CleanShot X | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taking the screenshot | Uses your existing keys | ⌘⇧3 / 4 / 5 | Best-in-class capture and annotation |
| Text inside the image | Extracted and indexed | Live Text, when it is legible | Built-in OCR on a shot |
| Search by exact phrase | Yes | Sometimes, via Spotlight | Filename and folder only |
| Search by what it was about | Yes | No | No |
| Annotation and markup | No — not a capture tool | Basic, in Preview | Yes, and it is very good |
| Scrolling capture and video | No | Screen recording only | Yes |
| Linked to your notes and threads | Yes | No | No |
| Price | Free tier, paid plans for more | Free | Paid, one-off licence |
If your problem is taking the screenshot — annotating it, hiding the desktop clutter, capturing a scrolling page, recording a clip — CleanShot X is the better tool and you should buy it. Stilou does not compete with it and works perfectly well alongside it. Come here if the shots get taken fine and then vanish into a folder you never open again.
What happens to the images
In Private mode, screenshots are read on your Mac and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded, the egress counter in the app stays at zero, and the index built from them is a set of files on your own disk that you can search, export or delete.
In Connected mode, a passage from a shot can be sent to a hosted frontier model from Anthropic or OpenAI when you ask a question that needs it — the passage in question, not your image library. With your own API key, that request goes straight from your Mac to your provider and never through our relay.
Nothing is trained on your screenshots, by us or by the providers, and there is no background capture of any kind. Stilou only ever sees the shots you chose to take.
Frequently asked questions
Can I search text inside screenshots on a Mac?
Yes, with limits. macOS Live Text can pull selectable text out of an image, and Spotlight indexes some of it, so an exact phrase you remember correctly will sometimes surface the right file. What macOS cannot do is find a shot by what it was about, which is how people actually remember them. Stilou indexes both the text and the meaning.
Do I have to use a different screenshot key?
No. Keep ⌘⇧4, ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧5 or whatever capture app you already use. Stilou reads what comes out of the shutter rather than replacing it, so nothing about how you take a screenshot changes.
Does Stilou record my screen in the background?
No. It reads the screenshots you deliberately take, and nothing else. There is no continuous capture, no timeline of your day, and no recording happening while you are working. If you did not press the keys, there is nothing to read.
Where are my screenshots stored?
Exactly where they already were — your Desktop, or wherever you have macOS set to save them. Stilou does not move your files or take them into a library of its own. What it adds is an index that points at them.
Does the reading happen on my Mac or in the cloud?
On your Mac, in Private mode, where images never leave the machine. In Connected mode a specific passage can be sent to a hosted model when a question needs it, and you can see which mode you are in without digging through settings.
Will it work on a screenshot of a chart or a design?
Yes, and that is the case where it separates from plain OCR. As well as any text, Stilou records what the image appears to be — a chart, a pricing page, an error, a design frame — so "the chart with the red line" is a query that can succeed even with almost no words on screen.
What about screenshots I took before I installed Stilou?
The index covers what Stilou has read, so it begins the day you install it. Older shots stay findable the way they were before — Finder, Spotlight, Live Text — and the folder stops growing unreadably from that point on. It is the usual argument for starting sooner rather than at the moment you need something.
What do I need to run it?
A Mac on a current version of macOS, and permission to read your screenshots folder. On-device reading in Private mode runs best on Apple silicon. There is a free tier, and the app updates itself.