A local, searchable memory of everything on your screen — and the AI that queries it is your own Claude subscription.
Backscroll is an open-source, zero-dependency, macOS-first alternative to Screenpipe / Rewind. It quietly captures your screen on an interval, runs on-device OCR, and stores the text in a local SQLite database with full-text search. Then it exposes that history as an MCP server — so Claude Code (or any MCP client) can answer questions like "what was that error I saw an hour ago?" or "find the invoice number from that Stripe page" without you paying for a separate model.
The whole point: no bundled LLM, no API keys, no cloud. The intelligence is whatever model is already driving your MCP client. If you have Claude Code Max, you already have everything you need to reason over your own screen history — Backscroll just hands it the data.
your screen -> screencapture -> Vision OCR -> SQLite + FTS5
|
MCP server
|
Claude Code / any MCP client
- Zero Python dependencies. Pure standard library plus one tiny Swift helper (compiled on first run). No pip install of a 400 MB ML stack.
- On-device OCR via Apple's Vision framework — free, offline, fast.
- Your model, your bill. The MCP server contains no model calls. Point it at Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or anything that speaks MCP.
- Everything stays local. Frames and text never leave your machine. The database is a plain SQLite file you can inspect, back up, or delete.
- Honest about privacy. Recording your screen is powerful and sensitive. Backscroll makes it a deliberate, inspectable, easily-revoked choice.
- macOS (uses
screencapture,sips,osascript, and the Vision framework) - Python 3.9+
- Xcode command-line tools (
xcode-select --install) — needed once to compile the OCR helper
git clone https://github.com/AnthonyDavidAdams/backscroll.git
cd backscroll
pip install -e . # installs the `backscroll` commandOr run it without installing, straight from the repo:
python3 -m backscroll <command>Recording the screen requires macOS permissions. Grant them to the app that runs Backscroll (your terminal, or the Python binary if you use the launch agent):
- Screen Recording — System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording. Without this, captured frames are blank wallpaper.
- Accessibility — System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility. Optional; enables front-window titles.
Then verify:
backscroll doctor# start recording (foreground; Ctrl+C to stop)
backscroll start
# ...or record 24/7 in the background via a macOS launch agent
backscroll install-agent
backscroll uninstall-agent # stop it
# search from the terminal
backscroll search "stripe invoice"
backscroll search "kubernetes crashloop" --since 3d --app Terminal
# what were you doing?
backscroll timeline --since 2h
backscroll stats
backscroll statusRegister Backscroll's MCP server so Claude can query your screen history:
claude mcp add backscroll -- backscroll serve(If you didn't pip install, use the module form and set the repo on the path:
claude mcp add backscroll -- python3 -m backscroll serve.)
Now ask Claude things like:
- "Search my screen history for the invoice number I saw on Stripe today."
- "What error was in my terminal about an hour ago?"
- "Summarize what apps I spent time in this morning."
- "Find the article about interpretability I was reading yesterday and give me the key points."
Claude calls the search_screen, get_frame, get_timeline,
activity_summary, and stats tools under the hood.
Works with any MCP client (Claude Desktop, etc.) — the server speaks standard newline-delimited JSON-RPC over stdio.
Settings live in ~/.backscroll/config.json. View or change them:
backscroll config # print current config
backscroll config interval=10 store_images=false| key | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
interval |
15 | seconds between captures |
store_images |
true | keep compressed JPEG frames on disk (or text only) |
jpeg_max_width |
1600 | downscale frames to this longest edge |
jpeg_quality |
40 | JPEG quality (0–100) |
retention_days |
30 | prune frames older than this (0 = keep forever) |
min_text_len |
0 | skip frames with less OCR text than this |
display |
1 | display index to capture (1 = main) |
Identical consecutive frames (an idle screen) are detected by hash and skipped, so a still screen costs almost nothing. Trim old data anytime:
backscroll prune --days 14Everything is under ~/.backscroll (override with $BACKSCROLL_HOME):
~/.backscroll/
backscroll.db SQLite database (frames + FTS index)
frames/YYYY-MM-DD/ compressed JPEG frames (if store_images)
config.json your settings
bsocr compiled OCR helper (per machine)
recorder.pid the running recorder
To wipe your history: stop the recorder and rm -rf ~/.backscroll.
Backscroll records your screen. Treat it accordingly.
- All data is local and unencrypted on disk. Anything visible on screen —
passwords in plaintext, private messages, financial data — can be captured
and OCR'd. Use
retention_days,prune, andstore_images=falseto limit exposure, and consider full-disk encryption (FileVault). - Only record your own device, and be mindful of others' content (shared screens, video calls, other people's messages).
- Nothing is uploaded by Backscroll itself. When you ask Claude a question, the relevant snippets are sent to your MCP client's model as part of that request — same as any other prompt you send it.
Screenpipe is a capable, cross-platform, Rust-based product with continuous video, audio transcription, and a plugin marketplace. Backscroll is deliberately smaller: macOS-only, screen-text-only (for now), no bundled models, no daemon you don't control — a few hundred lines you can read in one sitting, built to plug straight into a Claude Code subscription.
- Audio capture + transcription (whisper.cpp) as an optional module
- Multi-display and per-app capture rules (allow/deny lists)
- Optional at-rest encryption for the database and frames
- Perceptual-hash dedupe and smarter idle detection
- Linux/Windows capture + OCR backends
Issues and PRs welcome. Keep it dependency-light and local-first.
MIT © EarthPilot