Every question this site answers
Written for someone who arrived in the middle of a problem rather than at the front door. Each page takes one question and answers it, including the parts where the answer is that something else is the better tool.
When you cannot find something
The two ways people describe this problem when they describe it in their own words rather than in a software company's. Both pages start with what to try using only the tools already on your Mac.
- I cannot remember what I called it. Four ways to find a file on a Mac without its name, using tools you already have, and what to do when none of them work because you only remember what was inside it.
- I need an old invoice and cannot find it. Receipts arrive in four different shapes and three of them are invisible to ordinary search. What to try first, and how on-device OCR makes a photographed receipt findable.
What ordinary search cannot read
Four kinds of file that a Mac handles badly, and what has to happen for each of them to become findable at all.
- Why can I not search the text in a PDF? Find the PDF by a phrase inside it, not its filename. Reads PDF text, OCRs scanned ones, and matches on meaning — across your whole disk, on-device.
- Why can nothing find my scanned paperwork? A scan is a picture, so ordinary Mac search finds nothing in it. On-device OCR in 30 languages makes it searchable — without altering your file.
- Can I search photographs and screenshots by what is in them? Spotlight tags a photo with one word. Loupe describes the whole scene, on-device, so you can search for what you actually remember seeing.
- Can I search a repository by what the code does? Describe the file and get it, across every repository on your disk. Identifiers read as words, declarations outrank mentions, node_modules skipped.
Compared with other tools
Each of these has at least one row where the other product is the better answer, which is the only reason to trust the rest of the rows. If you are weighing two of these against each other rather than against doing nothing, read the tables and ignore the prose.
- What can Spotlight not do? Spotlight only finds text that is already text. Loupe reads scans, photos and screenshots on-device, and matches meaning as well as words.
- How does this differ from HoudahSpot? HoudahSpot searches the Spotlight index with far better controls. Loupe builds its own, reading scanned pages and photographs on-device so they become searchable too.
- How does this differ from DEVONthink? DEVONthink manages a library you build. Loupe searches the folders you already have, reads the scans and photographs in them on-device, and never moves a file.
- How does this differ from FoxTrot? FoxTrot builds its own index across a very wide range of formats and matches text literally. Loupe reads fewer formats, but also reads pictures and matches meaning.
Whether to trust it with the disk
One page, written to be checkable rather than reassuring, including the places where the honest answer is narrower than the usual marketing sentence.
- Does anything of mine leave the machine? What private actually means for a search tool: where the index lives, what the models do, and the one thing Loupe sends over the network, which is not your files.
What is not here
Anything about the product itself lives on the home page: what it does, what it costs, what it requires, and the questions people ask before buying. This section is for the problem, not the purchase.