Review: If you saw it on your Mac, you can search for it

NEW YORK—I don’t have a photographic memory, much as I wish otherwise. But the remarkably useful, if still imperfect, digital search tool that I’ve been testing for more than a month now called Atlas Recall has given my Mac a photographic memory.

The app, free for now and from Seattle startup Atlas Informatics, promises that “if you’ve seen it, you can search for it.”

*Why you want it. Behind the scenes, Atlas Recall indexes everything you’ve looked at on your computer, and lays them out in visual thumbnails when you conduct a search. In other words, you don’t just get a descriptive search result or link, you get to actually see what you saw, at least most of the time.

Such thumbnails are organized by timeframe (today, last week, last year, etc.) and/or by the type of digital item you’ve viewed or chosen to narrow the search on. That could be web pages, documents, email messages, chat messages, or all of the above. For now, Recall can capture content from the Safari and Chrome browsers on a Mac, from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and Adobe PDFs.

Clicking a thumbnail lets you open the underlying item inside Recall. You can also click an “open at the same time” button to see what else was on your computer screen when you were working on items you’ve searched on, the theory being that you might trigger memories based on shared events.

Data captured from your computer is encrypted and kept in the cloud, meaning you’ll need Internet connectivity to take advantage of Recall. It also means you can run searches that span more than one machine.

Consider Atlas more as a complement rather than a substitute for Google or other search engines. In fact, you can display Recall thumbnails in a panel adjacent to the regular Google search results, or as part of Spotlight searches on a Mac. There are browser “extensions” for Google Chrome and Apple Safari as well.

I usually launched Recall directly and found more often than not that these visual search results were exceedingly helpful.

A recent Recall search for “CES” found exchanges I had with my editor about the upcoming trade show inside Slack, invitations to press gatherings from email, along with relevant CES web pages.

*The limitations. Still, for all its potential, Recall in its current incarnation has limits. The app is an open beta and confined for now to Mac computers and iOS devices. And the iOS version is merely a pointer to the digital items from your computer, not items you’ve searched for on an iPhone.

Versions for Windows PCs and Android devices are promised soon.

Recall can search the metadata around a photo or video to reveal pictures or images in your search. But there’s no facial recognition technology currently built into the app.

Nor can Recall search back in time to uncover stuff you looked at before you installed the app.

Among other known issues: In searching messaging apps such as Slack, WhatsApp or Messages, Recall might open a screenshot instead of the actual messaging application. Or it might open the app but not take you the actual thread of the conversation you’re trying to find. The company says it is working on fixes.

*Security. By now you’re almost certainly wondering about privacy and security. Yes, Recall captures screen grabs of every place you go to on the Web, including, for example, your bank’s website. Fortunately, you can remove items from your search after the fact.

You can also take preventative steps. Before visiting sensitive sites, you can “pause” Recall for periods of 15 minutes, 30 minutes or one hour.  You can also add websites to a “block list” which stops the app from collecting information on the given site from then on.

Despite current shortcomings, if you’ve got a Mac, Atlas Recall is well worth checking out, especially while it remains free. (Eventually, Atlas envisions a “freemium” model.)  Recall only figures to get better and even now its visual reminders prove that seeing is not only believing, but truly helpful.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow Paste BN Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

The bottom line

Atlas Recall

Free; www.atlas.co

Pro. Visual thumbnails let you search what you've seen, across various apps or websites. Works across devices.

Con. Still beta. Apple products only, for now. May not open some apps or take you to precise thread of conversation.