What Spotlight is
Spotlight is iOS's built-in global search — swipe down on the home screen and a search box pops up, normally used to search for apps, contacts, and notes. Apple exposes an interface called Core Spotlight that lets third-party apps submit their own internal content into this system-level index, and that's the mechanism ScreenNote taps into.
How to trigger it
Swipe down from any home screen to bring up the search box, and type your keyword directly — no need to open the ScreenNote app first. If there's a match, the system-wide result shows up with ScreenNote's icon and a thumbnail; tap it and you jump straight into that note's detail page.
When the index gets built
There's no manual "add to Spotlight" step. As soon as ScreenNote finishes processing a screenshot in the background, it automatically submits that shot's title, summary, and tags into the system index — the whole thing happens right after recognition completes, with no extra trip to Settings or a confirmation tap needed. In other words, if a screenshot can already be found inside the app, system search has usually already indexed it too — the two stay in sync.
What actually gets searched
What's indexed into the system is a screenshot's title, its AI-generated summary, and any tags attached to it — these usually come from AI processing, so once AI is configured and a note has a title and summary, Spotlight's match accuracy and coverage get better. Even without AI configured, as long as a note has tags, those tag words can still be searched.
How this differs from search inside the app
Search inside the app matches against the complete OCR text recognized inside the image — even an unremarkable line buried in a screenshot can be found as long as you remember a few characters of it; it's the most thorough, fine-grained way to search. Spotlight's scope is narrower (title, summary, tags), and what you get in exchange is the speed advantage of not having to open the app first. The two aren't a replacement for each other: when you can't remember which app something's in, try Spotlight first day-to-day; when you need to precisely track down a specific line inside an image, open ScreenNote's own search.
When this actually comes in handy
Say you suddenly need to confirm a number from a meeting-notes screenshot right before a meeting starts, and you're already inside another app, not wanting to switch out and go find ScreenNote first — swipe down for the search box, type a few characters, and jump straight there. That's far faster than "quit the current app, find the ScreenNote icon, open it, then search." Once you've found it, if that screenshot happens to contain key information like a verification code or order number, you can copy it in one tap too.
