Find the screenshot you took, by what was on it
Two thousand files called Screenshot 2026-08-04 at 14.22 and IMG_4471. Every one of them was worth keeping, and not one of them is findable.
Loupe reads the text inside your screenshots and photographs with on-device text recognition, and describes pictures that have no text in them using a vision model that also runs on your Mac. Both the recognised text and the description are indexed as ordinary text, so you can search for what you saw rather than when you saw it.
Screenshots are the worst-named files on the disk
Nobody renames a screenshot. You take it because something on screen mattered — a booking reference, a bank transfer, an error message, a conversation about a delivery date — and then it lands on the Desktop under a timestamp. A month later you know exactly what was in it and have no idea when you took it, which is the one piece of information the filename actually contains.
The frustrating part is that a screenshot is usually almost entirely text. It just happens to be text made of pixels, which no ordinary index reads.
Two different problems, two different answers
Pictures with words in them
Screenshots, photos of receipts, a picture of a form someone handed you. These go through text recognition on your Mac, and the words come back as text. Searching for seat 14A finds the screenshot of the boarding pass.
Pictures with no words in them
A whiteboard, a sofa in a showroom, a room you photographed before moving out. There is nothing to recognise, so instead a vision model looks at the picture and writes a sentence describing it. That sentence is indexed exactly like the contents of a document, which means the search box does not need a special mode: you type the whiteboard from the workshop and the picture comes back, with the description shown underneath so you can see why.
All of it on your machine
A feature that looks at every photograph you own is a feature that has to be honest about where the looking happens. It happens here. The vision model is downloaded once on the first run, by a separate helper, and its size is listed before anything begins — it is the largest thing the app fetches, and you can decline it on that screen and keep everything else. After that first download nothing leaves the Mac: not a picture, not a filename, not a description.
The descriptions are on by default. That is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as consent: the setup screen shows the switch already enabled, with the download size beside it, and turning it off there is one click.
What it costs you in time
Describing pictures is the slowest thing the app does, and it is the part of the first run that takes a while. Documents are quick; a folder of ten thousand photographs is not. Afterwards it keeps up on its own, though a photograph you save today takes longer to become findable by its description than a document does — it is waiting its turn.
What it will not do
It will not sort your photos, tag them, deduplicate them, move them into albums or rename them. It does not touch your Photos library, whose contents belong to Photos. It reads image files where they sit and leaves them exactly there.
Questions people ask about this
How do I search screenshots by their contents on a Mac?
You need something that has read them. A screenshot is a picture, so its text is not stored as text and the filename is a timestamp. Loupe runs text recognition over every screenshot on your disk and indexes the words it finds, so searching for “booking confirmation” returns the screenshot of one.
Does it work on photos with no writing in them at all?
Yes. A picture with no text is handed to a vision model that writes a plain description of it — “a whiteboard covered in handwriting, with three columns and arrows drawn between them” — and that description is indexed as ordinary text. Searching for “the whiteboard from the workshop” then finds it.
Are my photos sent anywhere to be described?
No. The model runs on your Mac. It is downloaded once, by a separate helper, on first run — its size is shown before anything starts and you can decline it there. After that no picture, filename or description ever leaves the machine.
Can I turn the picture descriptions off?
Yes. It is a switch, and it is on by default — the setup screen shows it enabled, together with the size of the model it needs. Turning it off means photographs stay findable by filename, date and any text recognised in them, but not by what they show.
Does it search my Photos library?
It reads image files in the folders you point it at, Pictures included. Photos’ own library is a package, and the app never opens package contents — so pictures managed inside the Photos app are Photos’ business, and files sitting in ordinary folders are this app’s.
How long does describing pictures take?
Longer than reading documents, and it is the slowest part of the first run. A newly saved photo takes a while to become findable by its description while it waits its turn, whereas a document you save is findable seconds later.
Search your Desktop for something you saw.
Not the date. Not the filename. What was on the screen when you pressed ⇧⌘4.
- Apple silicon · macOS 26 or later
- No account
- Nothing leaves your Mac