How do you search for text inside a screenshot?
Ordinary search cannot read a screenshot, because a screenshot is a picture of text rather than text. The fix is OCR — optical character recognition — which reads the words out of the image and stores them alongside it, so searching for a phrase you remember seeing finds the image that contains it.
Why filenames fail
Most screenshots are saved as something like Screenshot 2026-03-14 at 11.42.08.png. That name records when you took it and nothing about what it says, so six months later the only way to find one is to scroll. A folder of a few thousand images is effectively write-only storage.
Doing it in Yarnboard
- Paste or upload the screenshot as a note.
- Yarnboard runs OCR over the image and keeps the extracted text with the note. This is a Pro feature.
- Add at least one tag. Yarnboard requires a tag on every entry, which is what stops a saved image disappearing into an untagged pile.
- Search later using a phrase from inside the image, not the filename.
What OCR will and will not catch
OCR is reliable on screenshots of interfaces, articles, and chat threads, because that text is rendered cleanly at screen resolution. It is less reliable on handwriting, heavily stylised type, and text laid over busy photographs. If a screenshot matters, it is worth adding a tag or a sentence of your own so it is findable even if OCR misreads part of it.
Common questions
Does this work on photographs of documents?
Usually, if the photo is well lit and roughly square-on. Angled or shadowed photos of paper are the hardest case for OCR.
Do I have to tag every screenshot?
Yes. Yarnboard requires at least one tag on every entry. It is a deliberate constraint: the untagged pile is exactly what makes a screenshot folder unsearchable.
Is OCR included in the free plan?
No, OCR is part of Pro. The free plan still lets you save, tag, and search notes.