How do I search screenshots by the text inside them?

Apple's iOS 17 added Live Text to the Photos app, which means you can search for words *inside* screenshots — not just the filename or date. It works, but with three caveats.

How to use Apple's built-in screenshot text search:

• Open the Photos app.
• Tap the search icon (magnifying glass) at the bottom.
• Type a word you remember from the screenshot — for example "confirmation number" or "Uber" or "44 Lafayette St."
• Photos returns matching screenshots from your entire library.

The three caveats:

• Live Text only indexes screenshots when Photos has had time to process them, which can take days or weeks after capture, especially on older iPhones. If you just took a screenshot, search may not find it for hours.
• It searches printed text, not handwriting. Notes you wrote with Apple Pencil won't show up.
• It doesn't index text inside videos, only stills.

For most people, Live Text is enough. But if you have 5,000+ screenshots and need to find one specific receipt from 9 months ago, the search becomes slow and false positives mount.

That's where a dedicated app like Némos pulls ahead. It runs Apple Vision OCR on every screenshot the moment you save it, builds a searchable index on-device (your screenshots never go to the cloud), and adds semantic search powered by Apple's Foundation Models on iOS 26 devices — so you can search for "the receipt for the espresso machine" and it'll find a screenshot that contains "DeLonghi La Specialista" without you typing that brand name.

Free, fast, private. Available on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS.