Search screenshots by the words inside them.

The built-in method

Search text inside screenshots with Photos

1. Open the Photos app.
2. Tap Search in the bottom-right corner.
3. Enter distinctive text you remember from the image: an email address, phone number, product name, domain, or phrase.
4. Tap a suggestion or run the search, then swipe up to browse all results.

Apple says Photos can search for text such as an email address or phone number. It can also search within a specific album or collection, so opening the Screenshots collection first can keep the review focused.

Search from the Home Screen with Spotlight

Swipe down on the Home Screen or Lock Screen and enter the text you remember. Apple says Spotlight can find text in photos using Live Text. Scroll to photo results and open the likely match.

Useful searches for a privacy cleanup

Try words that are likely to appear near sensitive material rather than attempting to guess the secret itself:

• Account access: password, recovery, backup code, verification, 2FA.
• Developer work: API key, token, authorization, secret, webhook.
• Financial records: card, bank, account, routing, receipt.
• Documents: passport, license, insurance, patient, prescription.
• Your own anchors: a company domain, support address, app name, or recognizable heading.

Review results yourself. A word such as “password” may appear in harmless help text, while a real credential may appear without any descriptive label.

If passwords are your main concern, use the focused password screenshot and photo cleanup guide to separate Passwords-app records from photographed credentials and remove image copies safely.

For passports, licenses, and identity cards, the ID document photo guide combines Photos Utilities, exact-text search, private pattern scanning, and careful deletion.

When exact text search is not enough

Built-in search is excellent when you know what to type. A privacy audit is different: you may not remember which screenshots exist, the risky value may have no label, OCR may miss degraded text, and several credential formats look like ordinary random strings.

SecretScan is designed for that narrower job. It performs on-device OCR and pattern checks across screenshots, ranks likely findings for review, and can save a redacted copy or request deletion of the original. It can still miss content or produce false positives, so it complements rather than replaces manual review.

Deleting an image does not revoke a secret

If a password, token, recovery code, or API key may have been exposed, rotate or revoke it through the service that issued it. Removing its screenshot reduces one copy; it does not invalidate the underlying credential.

Before sharing a screenshot you find

If you need to send the screenshot, review the entire frame—not only the text you searched for. Use the built-in Markup redaction workflow for visible private areas, and separately check photo location metadata when the image came from Camera rather than a screen capture.