How to find an old screenshot on a Mac

You remember roughly when you took it. Last spring, or the week of that trip, or just before a meeting. What you don’t have is a name, because every screenshot is called “Screenshot” followed by a date and a time. This guide starts with the ways macOS can narrow things down by date, then covers recovering one you deleted, and ends with what to do when the date alone isn’t enough.

Where are your screenshots, anyway?

Before sorting anything, open the right folder. Apple says screenshots save to the desktop by default, and that you can change the destination in the Screenshot app: press ⇧⌘5, open Options, and look under Save to. If you’ve ever changed that, or someone set up your Mac, your old screenshots may be in a folder you’ve forgotten about.

Two quick checks help. Look in Options for the current location, which only tells you where new screenshots go. For older ones, check the Desktop, the Documents and Downloads folders, and any folder you remember creating for them. Changing where screenshots save on a Mac covers the setting in full, and it’s worth fixing once so that every later search has one place to look.

How do you find a screenshot by date in Finder?

Three approaches, from quickest to most thorough.

Sort the folder by date

Open the folder, then choose View › as List. In List view, point at a column name and click it to sort by that column. Click it again to reverse the order. If Date Created isn’t showing, add it under View › Show View Options. Apple’s guide also describes View › Show View Options, where the Sort By menu lets you pick an order such as Date Modified or Name.

Use Date Created rather than Date Modified. Opening and editing a screenshot, in Preview for instance, can change the modified date and leave the created one alone.

To jump straight to a month, click the Date Created heading until the oldest files are on top, and scroll. Apple also lets you group items, with the Group button in the toolbar, and Date Created is one of the options. That puts the files under date headings, so you can skip straight to the stretch you remember.

Make a Smart Folder for a date range

When the screenshots are spread over several folders, or you only know “sometime this year”, a Smart Folder searches all of them at once. Apple describes it as a folder whose contents update automatically as files matching your rules appear.

1. In the Finder, choose File › New Smart Folder.
2. Click the Add button (+) below the search field.
3. In the first pop-up menu, choose Kind. In the second, choose Image.
4. Click Add again. In the first pop-up menu choose Created Date, or choose Other to see the whole list of attributes. Then set a range, such as within the last 6 months.
5. Click Save, give it a name, and click Save again.

The result is every image created in that range, which includes photos, downloads and logos along with your screenshots. Switch to List view and sort by Date Created to see them in order.

Ask only for screenshots

Photos and downloads make that list noisy. macOS marks screenshots it takes with an attribute called kMDItemIsScreenCapture, so you can ask for those alone. The query syntax is in Apple’s documentation, and the Terminal’s mdfind runs it:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop 'kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1 && kMDItemFSCreationDate >= $time.today(-180)'

That asks for screenshots in your Desktop created in the last 180 days. It only reads. $time.today(-180) means “180 days before today”, and -onlyin limits the search to one folder (leave it off to search the whole Mac). I could confirm that mdfind accepts the syntax, but I couldn’t test what it returns for this guide. If it comes back empty on yours, see what to do when Spotlight isn’t finding screenshots.

You can also put the attribute into a Smart Folder. Third-party write-ups, such as Scott Lowe’s, describe a Raw Query option in the Finder’s search criteria. Choose Other in the first pop-up menu, select In Menu next to Raw Query, and you can then type a query like kMDItemIsScreenCapture == 1. I couldn’t find it in Apple’s own guide, so treat that route as unofficial. If Raw Query isn’t in the list on your version of macOS, the Kind and Created Date rules above get you most of the way.

How do you find a screenshot when you remember a word in it?

If you remember what was written in the screenshot, search for that rather than the date. On macOS Ventura and later, Spotlight can search the text inside images through Live Text, in the languages Live Text reads. Press ⌘Space and type the word. The full walkthrough, including its limits, is in how to search the text in screenshots on a Mac.

A good combination is both clues at once. Make the Smart Folder from the section above for the date range, then type your word into its search field to filter inside it.

What if it was on the Desktop and you cleaned up?

Be realistic about this one. Whether a deleted screenshot comes back depends on what happened to it, and only two things are in Apple’s documentation.

The Trash. Apple says items aren’t deleted until you empty the Trash. If you haven’t, open the Trash from the Dock, find the screenshot, and either drag it out or select it and choose File › Put Back. Note that the Mac’s Trash is not the “Recently Deleted” album you may know from Photos or an iPhone. If you’ve set the Finder to remove Trash items after 30 days (Finder Settings › Advanced), anything older than that is gone from there.

Time Machine. If you had Time Machine backing up before you deleted the file, you can usually get it back. Apple’s steps: open the folder it was in (for the Desktop you don’t need a window), use Spotlight to open Time Machine, browse back to a date before you deleted it, select the file, and click Restore. It returns to its original location.

If you weren’t using Time Machine and you emptied the Trash, Apple doesn’t describe a way to bring the file back. Cloud services such as iCloud Drive keep their own copies of some folders, so check there too. Past that, be sceptical of any tool that promises to recover everything.

How does DejaShot help?

Everything above works from the date a file was created. DejaShot is a Mac app I made for when that isn’t enough. It reads the text in the screenshots in the folders you choose, and keeps a timeline of them.

• A timeline by day. The library groups your screenshots under day headings. Today and yesterday are labelled “Today” and “Yesterday”, and older days read like “Monday, March 14”, with the year added when it isn’t this year. On days DejaShot saw you capture, the heading has a line such as “14 screenshots · mostly Figma, Notion”, which is often enough to recognise the day. Older days show the count.
• Search by app and window. For screenshots taken while DejaShot is running, it notes which app and window were in front. That’s usually the app you captured, though not always, so treat it as a strong hint. Type app:figma to see only those, or combine it with a word you remember. Screenshots from before you installed it have their text and date but no app.
• Date filters in the search. after:march and before: narrow a search to a stretch of time, and the results label recent days “Yesterday” instead of a date.

The search panel opens with ⇧⌘Space from any app. You can choose a different shortcut if that one is taken. Across 20,000 screenshots, a search takes 31 ms. At the 95th percentile, on an M2 Pro, measured in the search engine itself. It runs on macOS 14 or later and works on your files where they are. There’s no account, and nothing is uploaded.

It isn’t a recovery tool. It finds screenshots that are still on your Mac and in the folders you chose. In Desktop, Documents and Downloads it reads only screenshots by default, and it never deletes a file. Window titles need the optional Accessibility permission, and without it DejaShot still reads every screenshot. For how it compares with doing this in Spotlight alone, see Spotlight and Live Text compared with DejaShot, and the pricing is a one-time payment.

A short checklist

1. Find the folder. Check Screenshot app Options for the save location, then the Desktop, Documents and Downloads.
2. In List view, sort by Date Created and scroll to the time you remember.
3. Not sure which folder? Make a Smart Folder with Kind is Image and a Created Date range.
4. Remember a word in it? Search that word in Spotlight, or inside your Smart Folder.
5. Deleted it? Check the Trash first, then Time Machine.
6. Searching often, and by app or day? A tool built for it, like DejaShot, saves the digging.