How to search your screen history on a Mac

01 The thing you saw and can't find

You read it this morning. A number in a spreadsheet, a name in a Slack thread, a sentence on a page you have since closed. You know it existed. Browser history gives you the page, not the sentence. Spotlight searches files, not screens. The thing you are looking for was on your display for eleven seconds and then it was gone.

This is the gap screen-recall tools close: a searchable memory of what your Mac has shown you, kept on the Mac.

02 What macOS gives you on its own

Browser history finds pages, and only if the thing was on a page. Spotlight finds files by name and content, and only files. Screenshots capture what you thought to capture, which is never the thing you needed later. Time Machine restores files, not moments.

None of these were built for "I saw it, where was it." They are indexes of things you saved. The problem is the things you did not.

03 Tools that record your screen so you can search it

The category is small. Rewind established it on the Mac and has since wound down. Microsoft Recall brought it to Windows, badly at first and then carefully. Screenpipe is the open-source option for people who want to build on the raw stream. Pixel Dust is the one built for Mac users who want to search and move on.

They all work the same way at the core: capture the screen at intervals, read the text off each capture, index it. Where they differ is what they store, where it lives, and who can read it.

04 How Pixel Dust does it

Every few seconds it takes a still of your screen, reads every word on it, and indexes both. Later, you type a fragment of what you remember and get the moment back — the actual screen, scrubbable, with the matching text highlighted. Meaning-based search catches the cases where you remember the idea but not the words.

Everything stays on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded. Turn on encryption and both the images and the index are sealed with a key only you hold. Password fields, private windows, and apps you name are excluded at capture, so they were never stored. Here is the full list of what it refuses to keep.

05 Questions people ask before installing one

How much disk? Pixel Dust keeps stills rather than video: a few gigabytes a month, and you set the retention window.

Does it slow the Mac down? Capture is cheap. Reading text is the expensive part, and it runs in the background with power-aware limits — off on battery if you want, never in Low Power Mode.

Can I tell when it's recording? Yes, always. macOS shows the recording indicator and we never suppress it.

What if I lose my encryption key? Your history is unreadable, by you and by us. That is why setup prints a recovery kit and makes you confirm it. We do not hold a copy.