How to Find a Screenshot on Mac (Even by the Text Inside It)

You took a screenshot of the error, the receipt, the tracking number or the slide. Now you need it, and your Desktop holds 400 files all called "Screenshot 2026-10-12 at 14.03.51". You remember what it said, not when you took it.

Here's how to find it, starting with what's built into macOS and ending with the approach that makes this problem go away.

1. Check where your screenshots are saved

By default macOS saves screenshots to the Desktop. If yours aren't there, someone (maybe you, a while ago) changed the location. To check:

1. Press ⇧ ⌘ 5 to open the Screenshot toolbar.
2. Click Options. The ticked folder under Save to is where they go.

If Clipboard is ticked, screenshots were never saved as files at all; they went to the clipboard and were replaced by the next thing you copied. Our guide to where screenshots go on Mac covers every case.

2. List every screenshot with one Finder search

macOS tags every screenshot it takes, wherever it ends up. Finder can search for that tag:

1. Open a Finder window and press ⌘ F.
2. Click This Mac.
3. Type kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1 in the search field and press Return.
4. Switch to List view and sort by Date Created.

Click Save under the search field to keep it as a Smart Folder in the sidebar, so every screenshot you take from now on shows up there too. This finds screenshots you moved or renamed, but not images other apps saved (a Slack download, a photo).

3. Find a screenshot by the words inside it

This is the search you actually want: type "invoice" and get the screenshot of the invoice. macOS can do a version of it, because Spotlight indexes text that Live Text recognises in images.

1. In Finder, press ⌘ F and choose This Mac.
2. Type a distinctive word that appears in the screenshot.
3. In the bar that appears, choose Contents rather than Name.
4. Click +, choose Kind is Image to hide documents.

When it works, it's great. But it has limits worth knowing:

• Indexing happens in the background, so a screenshot you took a minute ago may not be searchable yet.
• Not every image gets analysed. Images inside PDFs, for example, don't go through the same recognition as normal image files.
• Results mix text matches with objects macOS thinks it sees in the picture, so a search for "apple" may return fruit.
• Only files count. An image you copied from a web page or chat and never saved isn't a file, so Spotlight never sees it.

Photos has its own version: if your screenshots are in the Photos library (iPhone screenshots usually are), type a word into the Photos search field and it finds photos containing that text.

4. Make every screenshot searchable as you take it

The built-in searches work after the fact, and sometimes. The more reliable fix is to have every screenshot read once, as soon as it exists, and kept in a history you can search in a second.

That's what EasyPaste does. Point it at your screenshot folder and each new screenshot appears in your clipboard history automatically, without you copying it. In the background it runs Apple's Vision text recognition on your Mac and stores the words it finds. Then:

• Press ⌃ ⌘ V in any app and type a few words you remember. Every word has to appear somewhere in the image, in any order, so "refund march" finds a screenshot where those words are on different lines.
• Search ignores case and accents, so "cafe" finds "Café".
• Images you copy (from Safari, Slack, Figma) are read the same way, so they're searchable too, even though they were never files.
• Select the result and it's on your clipboard, ready to paste into the ticket, email or chat.

Nothing leaves your Mac: recognition runs locally, and EasyPaste has no account and no cloud.

Built-in search vs a searchable screenshot history

Comparing tools? See apps that search the text inside screenshots, or turn the habit into a system with screenshots as a second brain.

Frequently asked questions

Why can't I find my screenshots on my Mac?

They're probably being saved somewhere other than the Desktop, or to the clipboard instead of a file. Press Shift-Command-5, click Options, and check the Save to list. To find every screenshot wherever it is, search Finder for kMDItemIsScreenCapture:1.

Can I search for text inside screenshots on a Mac?

Yes. Spotlight indexes text that Live Text recognises in image files, so a Finder search with Contents selected can find a screenshot by a word in it, although indexing isn't instant and doesn't cover every image. A clipboard manager with built-in text recognition, like EasyPaste, reads each screenshot as soon as it's taken and searches it instantly.

Does searching inside screenshots upload them anywhere?

Not with Live Text or EasyPaste. Both recognise text on your Mac using Apple's frameworks. EasyPaste makes no network connections at all.

How do I find a screenshot I took on my iPhone?

Open Photos and choose Screenshots under Media Types, or type a word from the screenshot into the search field. If iCloud Photos is on, the same search works in Photos on your Mac.