macOS · Apple Silicon · ships on the Mac App Store

Find the screenshot the way you'd describe it.

Cairn captures a screenshot together with a voice tag. Later, type how you'd describe it — "the postgres lock thing Ivan sent me" — and Cairn finds it. Voice runs through Whisper on-device. Nothing leaves your Mac.

Download on the Mac App Store macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · 0 KB sent to any server
The problem

You took the screenshot. Future-you can't find it.

Twenty a week. Stack traces, Linear tickets, Figma frames, Slack threads, PR diffs. They land in ~/Desktop with the most useless filenames ever invented.

1Screenshot 2026-05-18 at 14.22.07.png812 KB
2Screenshot 2026-05-18 at 14.31.49.png1.1 MB
3Screenshot 2026-05-15 at 09.14.02.png644 KB
4Screenshot 2026-05-13 at 11.42.13.png901 KB
5Screenshot 2026-05-12 at 17.05.58.png733 KB
…1,279 more files—

Now find the one with the lock thing Ivan sent on Tuesday.

How it works

Capture. Tag. Find.

One shortcut. A quick voice note. A search bar that understands the way you actually talk about things.

01 · CAPTURE

Hit the shortcut.

Cairn captures the screen, runs OCR on what's visible, and starts listening — all in one move. No app to open, no window to focus.

⌃+ ⌥+ ⌘+ R
02 · TAG

Say what it is.

Say it out loud. "Postgres lock thing from Ivan." Cairn transcribes it on-device with Whisper and stores it next to the image. Don't feel like talking? Type it on the same shortcut.

listening
03 · FIND

Type how you'd describe it.

You don't have to remember your exact words. Cairn matches on meaning, not on string equality — across your voice tag, the on-screen text, and AI-generated context. Said "postgres lock from ivan"? Searching "that db deadlock thing Ivan sent" still finds it. Misspellings are fine. Phrasing is fine. Yesterday is fine. Last quarter is fine.

postgres lock from ivan
The objection

Talking to your screen still feels weird.

So don't. The same shortcut takes voice or text — whatever the moment is for. Open-plan office, headphones in, AirPods in a meeting, kid asleep in the next room. Cairn doesn't care which mode you used; the tag is the tag.

Voice Type
voice tag · on-device
Voice Type
postgres lock from ivan
Same shortcut. Same field. No mic needed.
On-device

Cairn is the deliberate, local-only alternative to passive recorders.

No accounts. No cloud transcription. No cloud embeddings. No telemetry. The app runs inside the macOS sandbox and only writes to its own container. You can verify it with Little Snitch.

AI outputs (transcripts and image tags) are model-generated and can be inaccurate. See the Privacy Policy for details.

  • CAPTURENative macOS screen capture, via ScreenCaptureKit.
  • VOICE → TEXTOpenAI's Whisper model, running on-device. Vocabulary-biased toward your existing tags so jargon transcribes accurately.
  • ON-SCREEN TEXTApple Vision OCR, also local.
  • SEMANTIC INDEXall-MiniLM-L6-v2 embeddings, 384-dim, stored in sqlite-vec. Voice-tag weight bumped at query time.
  • STORAGESQLite + your PNGs, inside the macOS App Sandbox container. Move your Mac, your library moves with it.
  • NETWORKZero outbound. Cairn doesn't ship with any URL strings. The sandbox enforces it.
~ · zsh
$ lsof -i -P -p $(pgrep Cairn) — no entries — $ strings /Applications/Cairn.app/Contents/MacOS/Cairn | grep -E '^https?://' — no matches — $ du -sh ~/Library/Containers/com.sonavia.cairn 412M ~/Library/Containers/com.sonavia.cairn # your screenshots, your transcripts, # your embeddings. all in there. nowhere else.
The deal

One-time purchase. No subscription. No login.

  • Buy it once. No recurring charge, no auto-renew, no seat counts.
  • Lifetime updates. Including future major versions.
  • Family Sharing. Up to five Macs you own.
  • Refunds via Apple. Cairn never sees your card.
  • Works offline forever. No cloud means no kill-switch.
Download on the Mac App Store

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Apple Silicon. ~280 MB on disk plus your screenshots.