You remember the shape of it. A pricing table. A dark hero with tiny type. A chart that went the wrong way. You almost never remember the sentence it contained.
Free. macOS 14 and later, Apple Silicon and Intel. No account.
01 · Seeing beats naming
Visual memory outlasts exact words.
Ask someone about an article they read last month and they'll describe the layout before they can quote a line of it. Appearance is cheap to store and easy to recognise; wording is neither.
Every conventional tool inverts this. It asks for the words and ignores the picture. Shelf indexes both, so the stronger memory is the one you get to use.
02 · Queries that work
Described, not named.
These are the kinds of things people actually type into Shelf.
Query“dark pricing page, three columns”
Matched by layout and read text
Nine results, one obvious
Query“handwritten diagram on white paper”
Matched by appearance
Text read from the photo
Query“error message, red banner, Xcode”
Matched by source app and read text
You don't recall a filename. You recognise a picture.
03 · What Shelf reads
Inside an image, on your Mac.
Text in the image
Shelf reads the words in a screenshot or photo, so an interface label or headline becomes searchable.
Subject and scene
What the image is broadly of, so “chart” or “map” finds it without any text at all.
Source
The app or site it came from, captured at the moment you kept it.
Neighbours
What you saved around it. Screenshots rarely arrive alone.
Grouping by pure visual similarity, colour palette and layout alone, is a direction we're still developing rather than something to claim today.
04 · Clusters
What that makes possible.
Once images are readable, they can gather by what they're about.
Dark interfaces
Similar appearance and read labels
Analytics dashboard
Editor at night
Terminal theme
Pricing pages
Read text mentions plans and per month
Three-tier table
Annual toggle
Enterprise row
Sketches
Photographs of paper and whiteboards
Flow diagram
Wireframe
Notebook page
Next thought
Sometimes the picture isn't the clue. The situation is.
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.