The Spotlight alternative for finding what's inside a file
Spotlight is very good at the job it was given. The trouble is that the job has changed: half of what people keep now arrived as a photograph of a piece of paper, and a photograph has no text in it to index.
Spotlight can only find text that is already stored as text. Loupe reads the file itself — running OCR over scanned pages and describing photographs with an on-device vision model — so a scanned invoice, a screenshot or a picture of a receipt becomes searchable by the words on it. All of it happens on your Mac; nothing is uploaded.
What Spotlight is genuinely good at
It is worth being straight about this, because a comparison that pretends the built-in tool is useless is a comparison you should not trust. Spotlight is fast, it is free, it is already running, and it reads the text of ordinary documents perfectly well. If you type the first few letters of a Word file's name, Spotlight will have it on screen before you finish the word. It also launches applications, does arithmetic, converts currencies and opens the settings pane you were hunting for — none of which is on offer here.
If your files are named sensibly and you remember the names, you do not need anything else. Most people's disks are not like that.
Where it stops
Spotlight builds an index of the text a file already contains. That single sentence explains almost every complaint about it.
A scan is a picture, not a document
When you scan a contract or photograph a receipt, what lands on the disk is an image. Open it in Preview and you can read it perfectly, because you can read pictures. An index cannot. There are no words in the file for Spotlight to store, so the file is findable by its name — Scan 2024-03-11.pdf — and by nothing else. macOS can pull text out of a picture when you ask it to, one image at a time, in Preview or Photos. That is a different thing from every scanned page on your disk being searchable.
Nothing describes your photographs
A screenshot of a booking confirmation is a wall of legible text that no index has read. A photo of a whiteboard is a record of a decision that exists on your disk under the name IMG_2093.HEIC. Both are findable only if you happen to remember when you took them.
Words, not meaning
Spotlight matches the words you typed. If you search for the lease for the flat and the document is headed Tenancy Agreement, the words do not line up and the document does not appear. You did not misremember it — you remembered what it was, and searched for that.
What Loupe does instead
It opens your files and reads them, once, in the background. Text documents are read straight through. Scanned pages go through optical character recognition, so the words printed on them become words in the index. Pictures with no text are handed to a vision model that writes a plain description — a whiteboard covered in handwriting, with three columns and arrows between them — and that description is indexed as ordinary text. Then, on top of the keyword index, it keeps a second one built on meaning, so a query and a document can match because they are about the same thing rather than because they share a word.
Every part of that runs on your Mac. There is no server on the other end, which is why searching keeps working with the Wi-Fi off, and why searching does not cost anything to run. It also never writes: nothing is moved, renamed, tidied or deleted, and there is no code path in the app that could.
| What you're trying to do | Spotlight | Loupe |
|---|---|---|
| Find a file when you remember its name | Excellent, and instant. This is what it was built for. | Also finds it, but you already had a tool for this. |
| Find a Word document by a phrase inside it | Works. Spotlight has read the text of ordinary documents for years. | Works, and also finds documents that mean the phrase without containing it. |
| Find a scanned invoice by the supplier’s name | Nothing. The page is a picture; there is no text to index. | Reads the page with OCR on your Mac, then searches what it read. |
| Find the photo of a whiteboard from a workshop | Only by filename or date, which is to say IMG_2093. | A vision model describes the picture on-device; the description is searchable. |
| Find “the lease” when the document says “tenancy agreement” | No match. Different words are a different query. | Matches on meaning as well as words, so the right document still comes up. |
| Launch an app, convert a currency, do a sum | All of it, instantly, and it is already on your Mac. | None of it. Wrong tool. |
| Search a repository by what the code does | Matches source text, and buries you in node_modules. | A separate code scope that ranks the file declaring a symbol above ones mentioning it. |
| Cost | Free, and included with macOS. | $5.99 a month or $39.99 once, after a 7-day trial. |
Before you buy anything, try this
If Spotlight has stopped finding things it used to find, it may simply have lost its index — that happens, and rebuilding it is free. Open System Settings, go to Spotlight, then Search Privacy, add your drive to the excluded list, remove it again, and leave the machine to re-index. If your problem was a broken index, that fixes it and you have spent nothing.
If your problem is that the thing you are looking for is a photograph of a piece of paper, no rebuild will help, because there was never any text there to index. That is the case this was built for.
Using both
⌘Space launches things. ⌥Space finds things. In practice the split settles within a day and you stop thinking about which is which — you reach for Spotlight when you know what the thing is called, and for this when all you have is a memory of what was in it.
Questions people ask about this
Does this replace Spotlight?
Not entirely, and it is not trying to. Spotlight launches apps, does arithmetic, converts units, opens System Settings and searches the web — Loupe does none of that and should not. It replaces the one job Spotlight is worst at: finding a document when all you can remember is what was written in it. Most people end up using both, ⌘Space for launching things and ⌥Space for finding them.
Why can Spotlight not find text in my scanned PDFs?
Because there is no text in them. A scan is a photograph of a page saved inside a PDF wrapper, so the file contains pixels rather than words, and an index that reads text finds nothing to read. Loupe runs optical character recognition over those pages on your Mac and indexes what it read, which is why the words on a scanned invoice become searchable.
Will rebuilding the Spotlight index fix my problem?
It fixes the case where Spotlight has quietly stopped indexing a volume, and it is worth trying first — it costs nothing but time. It will not help with scans, photographs or screenshots, because those never contained searchable text for the index to lose.
Does it use the Spotlight index?
No. It builds its own, in a single SQLite file on your Mac, and reads the files itself. That is why it can index things Spotlight has no importer for, and why deleting that one file removes everything it knows without touching a document of yours.
Is it faster than Spotlight?
Searching is instant in both. The difference is the first run: Loupe has to open and read your files once, which takes a while in the background, and describing photographs takes longer still. After that it keeps up with changes as they happen, the same way Spotlight does.
Try it on the folder you gave up on.
Point it at Documents, wait for the first read, and search for something you only half remember. Seven days, no card, and nothing of yours leaves the machine.
- Apple silicon · macOS 26 or later
- No account
- Nothing leaves your Mac