Retrace

About

Retrace is a free, open-source Mac app that keeps a searchable history of your screen. It captures your screen in the background at configurable intervals, uses on-device OCR to extract text from screenshots, and stores everything in a SQLite database on your Mac. You can scroll through your screen history and search for anything you've seen.

All data stays on your Mac, with no servers, no cloud, no login, and no tracking. Retrace is MIT licensed, so you can audit the code yourself, verify that no data leaves your Mac, and contribute improvements. The site says that advanced compression keeps a full month of screen history to about 10-15 GB.

Retrace requires macOS 13.0 or later on Apple Silicon. You can download version 0.8.7 directly or install it with `brew install --cask retrace`. The timeline scrolling view, easy exporting, and Rewind migration are listed as coming soon.