I feel like social media and recently the slate of AI-powered “tell me what’s here” features continue to show us the power and longevity of screenshots. After all, nothing beats a more or less approachable shortcut and a file format that works literally everywhere.

But screenshots have issues, and I liked how Bear (a note-taking app) brilliantly integrated OCR inside images into its flows. This just worked for regular ⌘F finding without me having to do anything:

The recognized text also appears when you search through notes, and so on. It’s just a great peace of mind that you’re not going to miss on text just because you happened to screenshot it.

Apple operating systems have had detection of text inside images for a while – I know on iOS in particular it sometimes gets in a way of normal gestures – so I thought it was just that, but curiously this doesn’t work as nicely in Apple’s own Notes.