v2.3.0

Privacy

• Common password managers are now excluded from recording by default. Password managers you don't have installed are hidden in Settings.
• New option to leave incognito and private browser windows out of recordings. Turn it on in Settings ▸ Privacy. It needs Accessibility permission and works in major browsers like Chrome, Brave, Firefox and Safari, but detection isn't 100% reliable.
  • (Sound from private windows is still recorded if system audio is on.)
• Fix: Deleting a time range now also removes it from summaries, including summaries made later. Deleting within the first 3 hours of a day also removes the previous day's summary.

Shortcuts

• New "Start Capture", "Stop Capture" and "Is TimeScroll Capturing" actions in the Shortcuts app. Use them in your own shortcuts and automations. They can run without opening TimeScroll.
  • For example, you can now set up an automation to stop capturing on battery!

Menu bar

• Better organized actions in the menu bar.

Other changes

• Optimized Direct mode to use less memory and CPU in Chrome and Electron apps. They now only keep the accessibility tree on when being used for capturing.

v2.2.1

Fixed usage stats and the Stats pane time range slider

v2.2.0

This update adds the summaries feature, which I'm very excited about, and I'll keep improving it in future versions.

Summaries

Select any range in your timeline to see where the time went and what you did. Summaries are written by a local Ollama model, so your screen text stays on your Mac.

• Click Select on the timeline, then drag across it, enter dates, or choose Today, Yesterday, This Week or Last Week.
• Summarize opens a panel with your time in each app and a written summary.
• Long ranges work too, including weeks, months and years.
• Finished days can be summarized in the background, which makes week and month summaries more detailed. Choose a default model in Settings ▸ Search to turn this on.
• Setup now includes summaries. If you've already finished setup, you'll see this once when you update.

Every part in the summary process is designed with efficiency in mind.

Time ranges

• Search within a selected range.
• Delete everything in a selected range.
• Export a selected range as a timelapse.

New: Timelapse export

• Export any period of your history as a video, with a choice of resolution and where the date and time appear.
• Speed it up as much as 600x (60x by default), or alternatively show 30 snapshots per second regardless of the time between them.
• Time when recording was stopped is skipped.

Other changes

• Single snapshots can now be saved as PNG or JPEG.
• Recording now resumes after display sleep, even if earlier attempts to restart it failed.

v2.1.0

Sessions

TimeScroll now groups your timeline intelligently into sessions: stretches of related work, even across app switches.

• Search results are also grouped by session. You can turn this off in Settings ▸ Search.
• The timeline shows each session on top of the snapshots. Click one to zoom in, or hover to see what you were doing.
• Live, Compressed Timeline and Invert Timeline Scroll were moved to a new View menu.

Timeline

• Jump to any day with the new calendar. Click the date to open it.
• Scrolling is much smoother with a large history.
• New gestures - drag to scrub, and pinch or Option-scroll to zoom.

Direct mode

Text capture in Direct mode was rewritten. It's faster, more accurate, and now reads only the visible text on each display.

Capture

• Recording recovers on its own after a display change or a screen recording crash.
• Added an "Active display" option.
• Lower CPU and power use when your screen is idle.

Search

• Ollama models that understand images can now search your screenshots, not just their text.

Privacy and data

• Reset All Data no longer touches files that aren't from TimeScroll, even if you chose a shared folder for storage.
• Deleting a single snapshot no longer removes the rest of that minute's recording.
• Leftover recordings from older versions are cleaned up automatically.
• The MCP log no longer records your searches or screen text.

Other fixes

• Fixed a hang when quitting.
• Fixed several crashes in search and the timeline.
• "Dedup sensitivity" is now called "Duplicate tolerance".

v2.0.0

v1 had a lot of issues, especially on macOS 27. This release fixes most of them and reworks storage, search and the encrypted vault.

Major fixes

• Fixed the app freezing on launch (#16, #12).
• Fixed the encrypted vault locking people out (#15). If this happened to you, the vault turns itself off on first unlock and your data should still be there.
• Fixed HEVC recordings older than 7 days being deleted regardless of your retention setting.
• Fixed retention only running when the timeline window was open.

Encrypted vault

The vault has been reworked and fully works on public builds now.

• You set a recovery passphrase when turning it on. Keep it somewhere safe, as it's the only way to get your data back if the keychain is reset.
• Unlock with Touch ID or your Mac password.
• Recording keeps going (and stays encrypted) while the vault is locked.
• Turning the vault off decrypts your data.

Timeline

• You can scroll back through your whole history now. Before, only the last ~1000 captures (a few hours) were loaded.
• New captures show up without resetting your scroll position.
• The latest capture shows at full resolution instead of a blurry preview.
• Fixed the previous screenshot sometimes showing when a frame failed to load.

Storage

HEVC is now the default format, and existing installs on HEIC are switched to it automatically. HEVC encoding was also tuned, so recordings are around 4x smaller than before.

Measured on text-heavy frames:

Format	KB per frame	Quality (PSNR)
HEIC (old default)	155	43.5 dB
HEVC, old settings	84	34.9 dB
HEVC, new settings	20	35.5 dB

• Text and OCR data now take up a lot less space. Existing data is upgraded in the background.
• Silent audio is no longer saved or transcribed (when audio mode is enabled).

Search

• Much faster AI search (170k captures in ~10 ms).
• Faster text search.
• Search and the timeline don't wait on recording anymore.
• AI search keeps working while embeddings are being rebuilt.
• Search matches are now highlighted in Direct (Accessibility) mode.

MCP

• MCP searches now go through the running app, which opens in the background if needed. The helper doesn't touch your database or vault keys anymore, and it's much smaller.
• No more storage migration needed to turn on MCP.
• Images are off by default now. When on, they're smaller JPEGs for the first 10 results.

New

• New "On app switch" capture setting: take a snapshot shortly after switching apps, either on top of your normal interval or as the only time it captures.

Other

• Less CPU and battery use: made some processing async, and optimized background processes.
• Settings UI fixes.