Local screen memory for macOS. Capture everything on your Mac, OCR every word, search any moment, get AI summaries. 100% offline. Free and open source.
Open-source alternative to Rewind.ai — without the cloud, the subscription, or the privacy tradeoff.
ScreenContext runs in your menu bar and silently captures your screen activity:
- Smart capture — Perceptual hashing + delta detection. Only captures when your screen actually changes (app switch, URL change, window title change). Low CPU, low storage.
- Local OCR — Apple Vision Framework extracts text from every frame. Region-aware: only re-processes the parts of your screen that changed.
- Ollama AI summaries — Frame, session, and daily summaries generated by your local LLM (llama3.2 by default). Nothing leaves your machine.
- Full-text search — SQLite FTS5. Search by text, app name, or window title across everything you've ever seen.
- REST API — 6 endpoints at
localhost:21890. Your tools (Claude Code, Raycast, scripts) get screen context programmatically. - Zero cloud — SQLite database on your disk. No accounts, no telemetry, no sync.
⌘ ⇧ E — copies your last 5 minutes of screen context to clipboard as structured markdown. Paste into any LLM for instant context about what you were just doing.
GET /api/status — recording state
GET /api/search?q=query — full-text search across all OCR text
GET /api/context?min=5 — recent context (markdown + JSON)
GET /api/screenshots — browse by date
GET /api/sessions — activity sessions
| Rewind.ai | Windows Recall | ScreenContext | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $20/mo | Windows only | Free |
| Source | Closed | Closed | Open source |
| Storage | Cloud | Microsoft | Local only |
| API | None | None | REST API |
| AI | Cloud | Cloud | Local Ollama |
- macOS 14+
- Ollama (optional — for AI summaries; works fine without it)
- ~200MB storage per day (configurable quality + retention)
MIT