How to search the text in screenshots on a Mac

You took the screenshot so you wouldn’t have to remember the details. Now you remember one word from it, and the file is called “Screenshot” followed by a date and a time. This guide covers every way macOS gives you to search the words inside a screenshot, what each one can and can’t see, and what to do when none of them is enough.

Can you search the text inside screenshots on a Mac?

Yes, with limits. Two parts of macOS do the work.

Live Text arrived with macOS 12 Monterey in October 2021. It recognises text in images on your Mac, so you can select it, copy it, look it up or translate it, in Preview and other apps. Recognising text is all it does. It doesn’t search anything by itself.

Spotlight learned to use it a year later. When macOS 13 Ventura shipped, Apple said Live Text “lets them search by text inside images”, and Apple’s iMac guide for macOS Tahoe 26 still puts it plainly: “With Live Text, Spotlight can search for text in images (available in select languages).”

So on a Mac running Ventura or later, a word you type into Spotlight can match a screenshot that contains it. Three things limit how far that goes:

• Languages. Live Text reads a fixed list of languages. Apple’s feature availability page names English, Chinese, Cantonese, French, German, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, some of them only for certain regions. Apple’s Ventura announcement also mentions Japanese and Korean. Don’t count on text in other languages being found.
• Indexing. Spotlight can only search what it has already looked at. A brand new screenshot, or a Mac that has just been updated, may not be searchable yet.
• What macOS records. Spotlight knows that a file is a screenshot and when it was made. It doesn’t know which app you were looking at.

The rest of this guide takes those one at a time.

How do you search screenshot text with Spotlight?

The quickest way needs no setup at all.

1. Press ⌘Space to open Spotlight.
2. Type a word or a short phrase you remember seeing in the screenshot. A distinctive word works better than a common one: an order number, a name, an error code.
3. Narrow the results to files. On macOS Tahoe 26, press ⌘2 to search only files, or click one of the categories that appear below the search field as you type. Apple’s own example of those categories includes Screenshot.
4. To keep the results to pictures, put kind:images in front of your word, as in kind:images invoice.
5. To see where a result lives, select it, then press and hold ⌘. Apple says the file’s location appears at the bottom of the preview.

If the screenshot shows up, you’re done. If it doesn’t, the Terminal gives you a more precise way to ask.

Listing only your screenshots in the Terminal

Spotlight stores a set of attributes for every file it has looked at, and mdfind is the Terminal command that queries them. Screenshots taken with the macOS shortcuts carry an attribute called kMDItemIsScreenCapture. It isn’t in Apple’s published reference, but it is in the list of attributes macOS 26.6 reports itself (mdimport -A prints it), and it’s the most direct way to ask Spotlight for screenshots and nothing else.

mdfind "kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1"

That prints the path of every file Spotlight has marked as a screenshot. Two variations are worth knowing. The first counts them instead of listing them, and the second only looks in one folder:

mdfind -count "kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1"
mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop "kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1"

All of these only read. They don’t change a setting or touch a file. A screenshot saved by another capture app may not carry the attribute, so if one is missing from the list, check the file itself. mdls prints a single file’s attributes, and once Spotlight has indexed a screenshot macOS took, it shows a value of 1:

mdls -name kMDItemIsScreenCapture ~/Desktop/your-screenshot.png

Adding a word to the query

Apple’s query syntax lets you combine conditions with &&, use * as a wildcard, and add [cd] after the operator to ignore case and accents. So this asks for screenshots whose text content contains “invoice”:

mdfind 'kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1 && kMDItemTextContent ==[cd] "*invoice*"'

mdfind on macOS 26.6 accepts that query. Whether it returns anything is another matter. Apple doesn’t document which attribute holds the text Live Text finds in an image, and I couldn’t confirm that it lands in kMDItemTextContent. Treat this one as worth a try, not as a promise.

If it comes back empty, ask the way the Spotlight window does. The -interpret option tells mdfind to treat your words as if you had typed them into Spotlight, and -onlyin keeps it to the folder your screenshots go to:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop -interpret invoice

Why doesn’t Spotlight find every screenshot?

When a screenshot you know exists doesn’t show up, the cause is usually one of these.

It hasn’t been indexed yet. Apple says indexing happens when you set up a Mac, after a software update or upgrade, and as data on the Mac changes. A full pass “can take hours or even days” depending on how much is stored, and it goes faster while the Mac is idle and plugged in. Apple adds that the incremental updates after that are much faster.

Its folder is excluded. In System Settings, under Spotlight, Search Privacy lists the folders and disks Spotlight is told to skip. A screenshot saved into one of them is invisible to every search on this page. Apple’s article on indexing also describes how to make Spotlight look at a folder again: add it to Search Privacy, wait a few seconds, then remove it.

The text isn’t something Live Text reads. A language outside Apple’s lists may not be found, and text that’s hard to make out, like very small or heavily styled type, may not be either.

The kind of result is switched off. Apple suggests checking whether the type of content you’re after is turned on for Spotlight in its settings.

There’s a longer guide to this: what to do when Spotlight isn’t finding your screenshots, including how to tell whether a folder is being indexed at all.

How do you search inside one screenshot?

Sometimes you already have the right file and need the line inside it: a tracking number in a long receipt, one error in a full-screen log.

Press Space in the Finder to look at a screenshot in Quick Look, and open it in Preview when you need its text. In Preview, Live Text lets you select the words in the image the way you would in a document:

1. Open the screenshot in Preview.
2. Drag across the text you want. If nothing highlights, choose Tools › Text Selection to turn on the Text Selection tool.
3. Control-click the selection and choose Copy Text. You can look it up or translate it from the same menu.

Apple’s Preview guide describes selecting, copying, looking up and translating that text. It doesn’t describe searching it, so don’t rely on Find in Preview for a screenshot. For a long one, the dependable route is to copy its text, paste it into TextEdit or Notes, and search there with ⌘F.

If copying text out of screenshots is most of what you do, the guide to copying text from a screenshot on a Mac goes into more depth.

Can you search by the app a screenshot came from?

Not with anything built into macOS. A screenshot’s file name holds the date and time and nothing else. The attributes macOS 26.6 lists for Spotlight include the flag that marks a file as a screen capture, and nothing that names the app that was on screen when you took it. So “the pricing page I screenshotted in Figma” can’t be asked of Spotlight, unless the word Figma happens to be visible in the image.

This is the gap I made DejaShot for. It reads the text in every screenshot in the folders you choose, using the text recognition built into macOS. For each screenshot you take while it’s running, it also notes which app and window were in front. That’s usually the app you captured, though not always, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a record. Reading window titles needs the Accessibility permission, which is optional. DejaShot still reads every screenshot without it.

Then you press ⇧⌘Space from any app and type what you remember. You can choose a different shortcut if that one is taken. “figma pricing” finds the pricing page you captured in Figma, even if the word Figma never appears in it, and filters such as app:figma, after:march and "exact phrase" narrow things down further. A search across 20,000 screenshots takes 31 ms. At the 95th percentile, on an M2 Pro, measured in the search engine itself.

Everything stays on your Mac. There’s no account, and your screenshots and their text are never uploaded. It needs macOS 14 or later, and you pay once. The details are on the pricing page.

Which way should you use?

Each of these is good at something different, and they work together. DejaShot doesn’t replace Spotlight. It gives your screenshots a search of their own.

If you search your screenshots once a month, Spotlight is probably enough. If you take them instead of notes and look for them every day, a search made for them saves real time. There’s a fuller side-by-side in Spotlight and Live Text compared with DejaShot.

Where should you go next?

The other guides each pick up one part of this. If the screenshot is months old and you only remember roughly when you took it, start with finding an old screenshot on a Mac. If a folder full of timestamps is the problem, see renaming screenshots automatically. And if your Desktop is buried, changing where screenshots are saved gives them a folder of their own, which also makes every search on this page easier to aim.