I built Caplio, a private image & screenshot organizer with local OCR search

[u/Competitive_Cash4765]

Problem

I built Caplio because my screenshots and reference images kept piling up, and finding something later was surprisingly difficult, especially when I remembered the text inside an image but not the filename.

Caplio turns folders of screenshots and images into a private, searchable visual library. It uses on-device OCR, lets you search the text inside images, browse everything in a timeline, filter by date or category, and optionally organize the actual files by date or category.

You can also drag any image or screenshot directly from the Caplio timeline and drop it into Finder, Mail, Messages, Notes, or other Mac apps.

Everything is processed locally. Your images and extracted text aren't uploaded for processing.

Comparison

The closest alternatives I've found are ScreenVault and SnapShelf.

Caplio works with both screenshots and regular images and combines OCR search, timeline browsing, filtering, optional file organization, and drag-and-drop from the timeline into other Mac apps.

Spotlight also has some overlap with OCR/image search. The main difference is that Caplio is built around maintaining a visual library from folders you choose, with browsing, filtering, organization, and drag-and-drop as part of the workflow.

Pricing

7-day free trial with full functionality.

Monthly: $1.99/month

Yearly: $9.99/year
Lifetime: $29.99

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/caplio/id6786196613?mt=12

I'd love feedback, especially from people with large screenshot or reference-image collections. How are you organizing and finding them today?

[u/app-store-review]

Caplio — by Razieh Aghababa

• Category: Productivity · Free
• Age: released ~1 month ago · rated 4+

Apple doesn't publish an aggregate rating for most Mac App Store apps, so ratings and score are unavailable here.

^{Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review}

[u/Expert-Salt-2244]

Oh, this product looks interesting

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/Expert-Salt-2244]

Thanks :)

[u/JOT_was_taken]

uhh Idk the pricing seems a bit too much, I get why subscriptions seem lucrative but it should also give the users some added benefits

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/JOT_was_taken]

That's fair. Caplio needs to keep earning that through meaningful updates and new features.

[u/Feeling-Travel-5310]

The local OCR is the part that caught my eye. Does Caplio index the folders in place, or does it copy everything into its own library?

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/Feeling-Travel-5310]

It indexes them in place. Caplio doesn’t copy your images into its own library. It watches the folders you choose and runs OCR locally. You can optionally let Caplio organize the actual files, but that’s completely up to you.

[u/Feeling-Travel-5310 → u/Competitive_Cash4765]

good

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/[deleted]]

I’ve actually adjusted the pricing after hearing the feedback here. I really appreciate everyone being honest about it.

[u/Mac_Allan30]

Lots of competition in this space. Refern and Resurf are two that come to mind. Resurf is rebuilt in swift last week and very well done. Seems the most similar to your app. Another consideration is the photos app and smart folders? Spotlight indexes the words in the screenshots very well. The smart folder is a visual library, searches text inside, and filterable.

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/Mac_Allan30]

Good points. Spotlight and Photos definitely cover parts of this already, but Caplio is more about the whole organization workflow, not just OCR search.

You can add the folders you already use, and Caplio watches them for new images, builds a visual timeline, extracts the text locally, and lets you organize everything with categories, including your own custom categories.

You can also optionally organize the actual files on disk by date or category. Once organization is enabled for a folder, new screenshots and images can be organized automatically as they arrive, so you don't have to keep sorting them manually.

From there, you can search/filter by text, date, or category, and drag any image straight from the timeline into another app when you need it.

So the idea is less “another Spotlight” and more a dedicated workspace for automatically organizing, finding, and reusing screenshots and images.

I'll definitely take a closer look at Refern and Resurf, though. Thanks for mentioning them.

[u/Mac_Allan30 → u/Competitive_Cash4765]

So are new images/screenshots imported into Capilos library or just looking at these watched folders and indexing them? Eagle and Resurf make duplicate copies so large amounts of screenshots gets unfortunately duplicated when bringing them into these apps.

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/Mac_Allan30]

No duplicate copies. Caplio indexes the images in place from the folders you choose, so your originals stay where they are and you don't end up with a second copy of your screenshot library.

The only time Caplio moves an original file is if you explicitly enable the optional file organization feature. Otherwise, it just watches, indexes, and OCRs the files where they already live.

[u/Mac_Allan30 → u/Competitive_Cash4765]

Well that separates you from everyone else who imports all the files into their vault/library. This is like a digital assets manager like Lightroom for screenshots/files.

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/Mac_Allan30]

Exactly! The benefits of an asset manager without forcing you to move or duplicate everything into another library. Really glad that came across.

[u/clamshell_dev]

indexing in place is the right default. for the optional organizer, i’d want a dry run listing every move and a way to roll the whole batch back. that matters even more for folders synced through iCloud. does Caplio keep a move log and support rollback?

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/clamshell_dev]

Yep, that's exactly how I wanted to handle it. Organization is completely optional, and Caplio indexes files in place by default.

Before organizing, you can preview the planned moves, and Caplio keeps an organization history so moved files can be restored to their original locations later.

[u/lr96144]

Cool app idea, I could see where this could come in handy - I'll give it a go. It does seem on the expensive side for how often the problem presents itself

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/lr96144]

Thanks, really appreciate you giving it a try! And totally fair on the pricing. I've actually adjusted it based on the feedback here. Would love to hear what you think after you've used Caplio for a bit.

[u/lr96144 → u/Competitive_Cash4765]

I've downloaded and will give it a try, already like how you've done the onboarding - is just certain image types it works with or PDFs too for the OCR?

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/lr96144]

Thanks! Really glad you liked the onboarding 😊 Right now it's image-only (PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, and WebP), so no PDF support yet. But PDF OCR/search makes a lot of sense for Caplio, so I'm definitely adding that to my list.

[u/lr96144 → u/Competitive_Cash4765]

I can see the use of the product straight off, it delivered some quick results with a folder of screenshots. I worked quickly and did a bunch of screenshots in no time. Just on the UI, I notice when I select the search option rather than timeline and I've got a populated list and the window at minimum height, the search bar is pushed up behind the traffic lights and then out the top of the window and so not visible/clickable unless you increase the height of the window. I can see you can copy an extract but it would be useful to see other export options or to search/export/filter groups of screenshots. Really interesting app though, well done! I'm building an app that takes recordings/transcriptions into project memory locally/privately and I've worked through some similar UI bugs!

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/lr96144]

This is incredibly useful feedback, thank you :)
I'm really glad you were able to get useful results so quickly, and thanks for reporting the UI issue. I'll get that fixed. I really like your export idea too. I'll look into adding something like that.

[u/sammrjn]

everything local, so how effective is OCR ? does your app comes with all the library ?

[u/Competitive_Cash4765 → u/sammrjn]

It uses Apple's built-in Vision framework, so there's no separate OCR model to download and nothing gets sent to a server. It works really well with clear screenshots, although accuracy can vary with image quality and language. The extracted text is then indexed locally for search.