Searchable alternative: Peekaboo vs Searchable
By Vishva Variya · Updated
Searchable is a focused, inexpensive app: it indexes your images on-device so you can find one by describing it, by showing it a similar image, or by the words in it. It needs macOS 15 and costs $1.99 a month, $9.99 a year or $19.99 for life. Peekaboo overlaps on photos and screenshots, then keeps going across every other kind of file on your Mac.
Looking for Searchable itself? It’s at apps.apple.com.
- Searchable price
- Free; $9.99/year or $19.99 lifetime
- Searchable requires
- macOS 15 or later
- Peekaboo
- $24.99 one-time (launch price $9.99 until Nov 13), 14-day trial, macOS 14+
Searchable figures from Mac App Store listing (id1641258618), verified 2026-11-03.
Why pick Peekaboo over Searchable?
Photos and screenshots, covered
Peekaboo reads the text in screenshots, photos and PDFs with Apple Vision and labels photos with Apple’s on-device classifier, so “screenshot with wifi password” and “dog on the beach” both work. Nothing leaves your Mac.
Every other file too
PDFs, documents, downloads, videos and apps, found by description (“pdfs from last week over 5 MB”) and grouped by the website they came from.
Where Searchable goes further
Searchable finds images by a similar image and uses semantic vectors, so free-form descriptions can go further than Peekaboo’s labels. If images are all you search, that matters.
Peekaboo vs Searchable, job by job
| Job | Searchable | Peekaboo |
|---|---|---|
| Images by description | Searchable: Semantic image search | Peekaboo: Photos labelled by what they show, on-device |
| Text inside images | Searchable: Yes | Peekaboo: Yes, in images and PDFs, with bulk copy |
| Find by similar image | Searchable: Yes, including batches | Peekaboo: Look-alike photos only in Duplicates |
| Documents, downloads, other files | Searchable: Images only | Peekaboo: Every file, in plain English |
| Cleanup | Searchable: Outside its scope | Peekaboo: Duplicates, Space Map, App Caches, App Uninstaller |
| Price and macOS | Searchable: Free; $1.99/month, $9.99/year, $19.99 lifetime; macOS 15+ | Peekaboo: One-time per Mac after a 14-day trial; macOS 14 or later |
The honest verdict
If you only ever hunt for images and want find-by-similar-image, Searchable is cheap and focused. If the image you’re after is one of many kinds of file you lose track of, Peekaboo searches all of them, reads screenshots too, and helps clear the space they take.
Searchable vs Peekaboo: questions
How much is Searchable?
- It’s free on the Mac App Store with in-app purchases of $1.99 a month, $9.99 a year or $19.99 lifetime, as of November 3, 2026. It needs macOS 15.
Does Searchable work offline?
- Its listing describes on-device image search. Its listing links a privacy policy but no product website.
Can Peekaboo find a photo by what’s in it?
- Yes. Turn on Search photos by what’s in them in Settings › Library, and Peekaboo labels your photos on your Mac in the background, alongside the text in them.