Flashback Screen History

Flashback is a searchable history of everything that has been on your screen.

It records your main display continuously, reads every frame with on-device text recognition, and lets you find a moment months later by typing a word you only half-remember, then scrub back through the actual screenshots.

Most of what you go looking for was never saved anywhere. A recipe skimmed at breakfast, 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 does not matter which app the thing was in or whether it left a file behind.

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 to scrub. Arrow keys step frame by frame; up and down jump to the moments the front app changed.

Private by construction. There is no account and no sync, and nothing is uploaded. Excluded apps never reach the recorder at all: while a password manager or anything else on your list is in front, those pixels are filtered out before a frame is written, rather than captured and cleaned up afterwards. Streaming services are blocked out of the box. Deleting really deletes, so throwing away the last fifteen minutes, the last hour or today removes the recordings along with the search index.

Two features can optionally call a language model, and both stay off until you add an API key of your own. Left alone, Flashback opens no network connection.

Requires macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon. A 7-day free trial, then a $19.99 one-time licence that is verified offline, so it keeps working with no activation server.