How the SuperCapture library stores and indexes captures

Every capture, recording and import you keep is an ordinary file in your save folder. The gallery is a fast index over those files, not a proprietary container. If the index is lost, the app can rebuild it from what is on disk.

The save folder

On a fresh install on macOS, the save folder is ~/Pictures/SuperCapture. You can change it in Settings → General → Save Location. Changing the default only affects new installs. Once your settings exist, the stored location is kept.

The default avoids iCloud Drive on purpose. SuperCapture has its own sync, and a library inside a cloud-synced folder gets synced twice. You can still point the setting anywhere you like. If the folder sits inside a cloud-sync folder, Settings shows a warning but doesn’t block you.

Note

Most media sits flat in the save folder, named by the file naming template. Fonts are the exception. Imported fonts are filed into fonts/{Family}/ and renamed to Family-Weight. To turn that off, use Organize imported fonts into family folders in Settings → Gallery.

Sidecars: the hidden .supercapture folder

Annotations, layers, video edit decisions and thumbnails live in one hidden .supercapture/ folder at the root of the save folder. That folder is split by item type (image/, video/, audio/, pdf/, font/). Inside each type folder, the path mirrors where the media file sits. A file at Design/Logo.png gets its sidecar at .supercapture/image/Design/Logo.png.image/.

Some sidecar files are authoritative and some are derived:

• Authoritative: metadata.json (image layers and capture context), manifest.json (video and audio trims, crops, camera and mix) and layers/*.bin (bitmap layer pixels).
• Derived: thumbnails. They can be regenerated from the media, so they’re safe to delete.

When you move an item into another folder from the gallery, its sidecar moves with it. The full layout is in Where data lives.

The index

Search, tags, collections and sidebar counts come from a SQLite database, supercapture.db. It lives in ~/Library/Application Support/SuperCapture, outside the save folder. Tags, collection membership, hidden and trashed state are also written out to state.json files in the sidecars, plus a collections.json at the sidecar root. That way they survive losing the database.

Rebuilding

Settings → General → Rebuild Library Index re-reads everything in your save folder. It restores the tags, collections and extracted text stored alongside your pictures. Use it after restoring a backup or moving to a new computer. Nothing on disk changes, and existing tags are never overwritten.

What happens after a capture lands

New files go through a background processing queue, and every step runs on your Mac:

1. Text recognition (OCR) uses Apple’s Vision framework. For videos, it samples up to 30 frames.
2. Classification runs Apple Vision image classification alongside a bundled MobileNetV2 model and adds the labels as tags. It also adds tags from the capture context: the app name, the window title and the capture mode.
3. Semantic tags come from the on-device Apple Intelligence model on macOS 26 and later. It reads the title, app, URL and OCR text. On macOS 27 hardware whose model supports images, it also looks at the screenshot itself. If Apple Intelligence is off or unavailable, this step is skipped.

At startup, the app queues any items that haven’t been processed yet. A new capture may take a moment to show up in text search. See Search.

The sidebar

The top of the sidebar has the views: Inbox, All, Images, Videos (with Loops and Recordings), Audio, Slideshows, Fonts, Duplicates, Shared, Hidden and Trash. Below them are COLLECTIONS and FOLDERS, in that order unless you turn on Show Folders above Collections in the sidebar. Both are covered in Folders, collections and tags.

• Inbox is the default view. It shows items at the top of the save folder that aren’t in any collection.
• Hidden holds items you hid with H. They stay out of the other views.
• Trash is a soft delete. A trashed item’s files stay on disk until you empty the trash or delete the item permanently.

New captures follow your current view. If a folder or collection is selected in the sidebar, new screenshots, recordings, and imported or pasted files are filed there. You can turn this off with Auto-file new captures into the selected collection or folder in Settings → Gallery.

Related

• Link an external folder to index files that live outside the save folder
• Keyboard shortcuts for moving around the gallery