Flashback
for macOS
A searchable history of everything that has been on your screen. Type a word you half-remember, and get the moment back.
macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon
⌘⇧F from anywhere. Results come back as thumbnails, because you tend to recognise the moment before you finish reading it.
- On device
- Recording and text recognition both run on the Mac. Nothing is shared to the cloud.
- Searchable
- Every frame is read, so you can search the words inside the pixels — saved or not.
- AI optional
- Off until you add a key of your own. Left alone, it opens no network connection at all.
01 — Timeline
Scrub back through your own day
Open a result and you get the hours around it: matches down the left, the recovered frame full size in the middle, and a colour-coded bar along the bottom showing which app was in front, minute by minute.
Drag the bar to scrub. The arrow keys step one frame at a time, and up and down jump to the moments where the app in front changed — which turns out to be the quickest way to find anything. A day has a very obvious shape, once you can see it.
02 — Search
The thing you want back was never a file
Most of what you go looking for was never saved anywhere. A recipe you skimmed. A paragraph in someone's email. One number on a page you closed twenty minutes ago. Flashback searches the text inside every frame it recorded, so it doesn't matter which app the thing was in, or whether it left any trace behind.
Which means the searches can be scruffy — half a phrase, the one word you're certain of. Typing a time instead of a word works too: yesterday 3pm or monday morning offers to take the timeline there.
03 — Privacy
Nothing leaves the machine unless you switch it on
- Nothing is shared to the cloud. No account, no sync, nothing uploaded.
- Excluded apps never reach the recorder. 1Password, Keychain Access and anything else you add are filtered out before a frame is written, rather than cleaned up afterwards.
- Streaming services are blocked out of the box — Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ and the rest.
- Deleting really deletes. Throw away the last fifteen minutes, the last hour or today, and the recordings go with the search index.
- Or let it forget on its own. Set an age or size limit and the oldest frames fall off the back.
Add any app to the list. Password managers and the streaming services are already on it.
Exactly what it's using, how long it's kept for, and a button to throw a stretch of time away.
04 — Optional
Ask about your own day
Two features can call out to a language model, and they're deliberately separate switches because they send very different things. Smart search sends only the words you type, and expands them into what the screen might actually have said — you search "invoice", the page said "bill". Ask answers questions in prose about a stretch of history, which means sending the recognised text from that stretch.
Both stay off until you add an API key of your own, and the key lives in the login keychain. Keywords-only isn't a degraded mode — it's how the app shipped and how it behaves until you change it. Left alone, Flashback never opens a network connection.
05 — Limitations
Two things it can't do
Protected video is a black rectangle
Netflix, Apple TV+, anything with protected playback: macOS hands the recorder black pixels on purpose, and no app can work around it. Your timeline gets a neat black hole every evening, exactly as long as whatever you watched.
Main display only
It records your main screen. If the thing you're hunting for was on the second monitor, it isn't in there.
Flashback for macOS
Drag it to Applications and grant Screen Recording when it asks. It starts recording quietly, and gets useful after about a day.
macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon