Frequently asked questions

It saves snapshots of your screen every few seconds (5 seconds by default) and extracts the text, so you can scroll back through your day or search for anything you saw.

Yes. Everything is stored locally in a folder on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, and there are no accounts or analytics. The only network requests are update checks (which you can turn off) and model downloads you start yourself.

It saves still snapshots, skipping near-duplicates. To save space, it stores them efficiently as compressed HEVC video segments on disk.

With light to normal use (about 300 snapshots an hour) and 8 hours of use every day, expect roughly 1–2 GB per month. Snapshots are stored as HEVC video, which is about 4× smaller than before. Text-heavy screens compress best, so busy or image-heavy screens will use more. You can lower the footprint with a shorter retention period or by compacting older history in Settings ▸ Storage.

AI mode searches by meaning instead of exact words. It uses Apple-optimized MobileCLIP2 image embeddings that run entirely on your Mac, or any embedding model from a local Ollama install.

Direct mode (the default) reads on-screen text through macOS Accessibility and uses much less energy. Legacy OCR reads text from the pixels instead, which works with apps that don't expose their text but costs more power.

It's designed to be lightweight: native Swift, adaptive sampling, duplicate skipping, and automatic cooldown when your Mac gets hot.

Optionally. You can turn on microphone and/or system audio recording in Settings ▸ Audio. Audio is transcribed on-device with Whisper. It's off by default.

Yes. Add apps in Settings ▸ Privacy and their windows will never be captured.

30 days by default. You can change retention, choose where data is stored, back up older snapshots instead of deleting them, and compact older history to save space.

When enabled (beta), the database and media are encrypted at rest. You unlock with Touch ID or your Mac password, and a recovery passphrase lets you restore access if the key in your keychain is lost. Keep the passphrase safe: without it, lost keys can't be recovered.

Yes. TimeScroll includes an MCP server. Copy the config from Settings ▸ MCP into Claude or another MCP client. Searches go through the running app, and it refuses them when MCP is off or the vault is locked. Results you share with an AI client are sent to that client's provider.

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon and Intel. You need to allow Screen Recording. Accessibility (for Direct mode) and Microphone (for audio) are optional.

TimeScroll checks for updates automatically and can install them for you. You can opt into beta releases in Settings ▸ Updates.

Yes. TimeScroll is free and open source. If it's useful to you, you can support development on Ko‑fi.