v1.1 — macOS 13+

Search what
you've seen

ShotMaker watches your Desktop, reads every screenshot with Apple's on-device OCR, and indexes it all locally. No cloud. No account. Just search.

2.4 MB  ·  free  ·  no tracking  ·  open source

$ shotmaker search "api key"
✓ 4 results (0.011s)
1. Screenshot 2026-04-14 at 09.22.png
   tag: code  ·  app: Terminal
   "export API_KEY=sk-proj-..."
2. Screenshot 2026-04-11 at 14.08.png
   tag: article  ·  app: Safari
   "...never commit your API key to git..."
3. Screenshot 2026-04-09 at 18.43.png
   tag: conversation  ·  app: Slack
   "what's the API key for staging?"
$

You screenshot everything.
You find nothing.

Error messages. Code snippets. That article you meant to read. A Slack message with a link. You take dozens of screenshots a week. Two weeks later you need one of them. It's gone into a folder of 3,000 files with names like Screenshot 2026-03-14 at 09.22.47.png.

Every screenshot,
instantly searchable.

ShotMaker runs quietly in your menu bar. The moment a new screenshot lands on your Desktop, it reads the text using Apple Vision OCR, tags it by type, and writes it to a local SQLite index. Full-text search. Semantic search. Filters by app. All on-device, all private.

Hit ⌥⌘F.
Type what you saw.

From any app, any context. The window appears, results show up in under a second, and the matching text is highlighted in the thumbnail. No account. No cloud. No setup beyond dragging it to Applications. It either works or it doesn't — there's no configuration to get wrong.

The app

ShotMaker — 456 screenshots indexed, searchable by tag and app
~0.3s
OCR per screenshot on Apple Silicon
0
Network requests ever made
FTS5
SQLite full-text search engine
Screenshots. No limits, no tiers

01

Full-text search

Every word in every screenshot is indexed with SQLite FTS5. Type any phrase you remember reading and it surfaces instantly.

02

Semantic search

Search by meaning. "error when deploying" finds screenshots about deployment failures even if those exact words aren't in them. On-device NLEmbedding, no API.

03

Automatic tagging

Screenshots are classified as code, article, conversation, receipt, notes, and more. Filter the sidebar to narrow results.

04

⌥⌘F anywhere

Global hotkey. Hit it from any app and the search window appears. No Dock, no switching. Uses Carbon, no accessibility permission required.

05

Clipboard ingestion

Copy an image from anywhere — browser, design tool, another app — and paste it into ShotMaker to index it alongside your screenshots.

06

Drag to export

Drag any thumbnail out of ShotMaker into a Finder window, email, or other app. It's just the original file.

How it works

step 01

Install the app

Open the DMG, drag ShotMaker to Applications. It lives in your menu bar — no Dock icon, no window unless you want one.

step 02

Grant Desktop access

macOS will prompt you once. ShotMaker needs read access to your Desktop folder to find new screenshots as you take them.

step 03

Take screenshots normally

Use ⌘⇧4, ⌘⇧3, or any other method. ShotMaker detects new files within 2 seconds and runs OCR in the background.

step 04

Search with ⌥⌘F

Hit ⌥⌘F from anywhere. Type what you remember. Results show up with the matching text highlighted in the thumbnail.

Your data stays
on your Mac

Everything — the OCR engine, the embeddings model, the database — runs locally. The app has never made an outbound connection and never will. You can audit this yourself: open Activity Monitor and watch the network tab while ShotMaker runs.

Network requests none
Account required no
Telemetry or analytics none
OCR engine Apple Vision (on-device)
Semantic embeddings NLEmbedding (on-device)
Database SQLite, local only
Source code available on GitHub

Stop forgetting
what you've seen

Download ShotMaker

version     1.1.0

platform    macOS 13+

size        2.4 MB

price       free

license     MIT