How to search for text inside screenshots on a Mac

Screenshots are how many of us take notes now: an error message, a confirmation number, a Wi-Fi password on a whiteboard, a slide from a call. The problem comes later. macOS names them by date and time, such as Screenshot 2026-11-03 at 14.32.10.png, and you remember the words in the picture, not the minute you took it.

Your Mac can read text in images. The trick is knowing which tool searches that text and which one only lets you select it once the file is already open.

Step 1: make sure Live Text is on

Live Text is the macOS feature that recognises text in images so you can select and copy it. It is on by default on supported Macs, but check:

1. Open System Settings ▸ General ▸ Language & Region.
2. Turn on Live Text.

Live Text needs a Mac with macOS Monterey or later. Once it is on, open any screenshot in Preview or with Quick Look (select the file and press Space) and you can drag across the text to select it, just like text in a document.

That solves "copy the text out of this screenshot". It doesn’t solve "which of my 900 screenshots mentions the invoice number?" For that you need search.

Step 2: try Spotlight first, but don’t rely on it

Press ⌘Space and type a distinctive word from the screenshot. Spotlight can sometimes match text found in images, so it is worth a try. In practice, results for screenshots in ordinary folders are inconsistent: you can check whether Spotlight has stored any text for a specific screenshot in Terminal:

mdls -name kMDItemTextContent ~/Desktop/"Screenshot 2026-11-03 at 14.32.10.png"

If that prints (null), Spotlight’s index has no text for that file, and a Spotlight or Finder search for its words won’t find it. On the Mac we tested this on (macOS 26), that was the result for a fresh screenshot on the Desktop. Spotlight is still the best way to find screenshots by date, which is often enough to narrow things down.

Find all your screenshots at once

macOS marks screenshots with a metadata flag, so you can list every one of them regardless of where they are saved or what they are called:

mdfind "kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1"

Add -onlyin ~/Desktop to limit it to one folder. The same query works in a Finder Smart Folder: choose File ▸ New Smart Folder, click +, open the attribute menu, choose Other…, add Raw Query, and paste kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1. Save it to the sidebar and you have a permanent "All screenshots" view, sorted by date.

Step 3: if the screenshot is in Photos, search there

If you keep screenshots in the Photos library, for example because they sync from your iPhone, Photos can search text inside images. Type the word into the Photos search field and look for matches in the text results. This is often the quickest route for screenshots taken on an iPhone.

It doesn’t help with screenshots saved to Desktop or Downloads on your Mac, which is where macOS puts them by default.

Step 4: build your own text search with Terminal

If you are comfortable with Terminal and want a free, local solution for folders, you can extract the text once and search it with grep. One way is the Shortcuts app, which includes an action to extract text from an image. Build a shortcut named "Screenshot Text" that takes an image as input, runs Extract Text from Image, and stops with the text as its output. Then run it from Terminal over a folder with the shortcuts command, something like:

mkdir -p ~/Desktop/screenshot-text
for f in ~/Desktop/Screenshot*.png; do
  shortcuts run "Screenshot Text" --input-path "$f" \
    --output-path ~/Desktop/screenshot-text/"$(basename "$f").txt"
done

Each screenshot gets a text file with the same name. Search them with:

grep -ril "invoice 4471" ~/Desktop/screenshot-text/

This works, but it is a project: you have to re-run it for new screenshots, and it breaks if you move files. Most people will prefer an app that keeps an index up to date.

Step 5: use an app that indexes screenshot text

Several apps can read and index text in images on your Mac. When you compare them, check three things:

• Where the recognition happens. Screenshots often contain passwords, bank details and private messages. Text recognition can run entirely on your Mac using Apple’s frameworks, so there is no reason for an app to upload your images.
• Which folders it covers. Desktop, Downloads and Documents at least, and ideally any folder you choose.
• PDFs too. Scanned PDFs are just images in a wrapper, and they have the same problem.

Bowerbird, our app, does this as part of being a Finder companion. It recognises text in screenshots, photos and PDFs on your Mac, starting with screenshots and recent files, and adds it to a local index. After that, typing a word into the normal search finds the screenshot that contains it, and the inspector shows the recognised text with a Copy Text button. Recognition uses Apple’s on-device Vision framework and reads English and Turkish text; nothing is uploaded. The same search also understands plain-English phrases like "screenshots from last week", which turn into filters you can edit.

Keep screenshots findable from now on

A few habits make every method above work better:

• Save screenshots to their own folder. Press ⌘⇧5, click Options, and choose a folder under Save to, for example a "Screenshots" folder in Documents. Your Desktop stays clear and searches have one place to look.
• Rename the important ones right away. Select the file, press Return, and give it a real name. A name like router-admin-password.png beats any search.
• Copy instead of saving when it is temporary. Hold Control while taking a screenshot (for example ⌃⌘⇧4) to put it on the clipboard instead of creating a file.
• Clear out old ones. Most screenshots are useful for a few days. Sort your screenshot folder by date once a month and move the old ones to the Trash.

Quick reference

Once you can search screenshots by what they say, they stop being clutter and start being a useful archive.

Bu konu Türkçe de var: Mac’te ekran görüntüsündeki yazıyı arama

• screenshots
• search
• live text