the numbers

Every figure on the Trawl homepage, where it comes from, and what it does not mean. All timings are from one machine: a MacBook Air (Apple M3, 8 GB memory) on macOS 26, using the maker's own files. Your numbers will differ with your disk, your files and your Mac.

4.6M files searchable

Every file on the test Mac's disk, mapped by name, including hidden files, system folders and app internals. The count is whatever is on the disk: about 4.6 million on the test Mac. Refreshed every 6 hours.

Search speed

Own files (home folder and Applications, about 25,000 to 50,000 items with their contents): 2 to 60 ms per query. Whole disk by name: 0.3 to 1 second. Optional smart ranking adds about 0.5 to 0.9 seconds.

13 browsers remembered

Safari, Chrome (and Chrome Beta), Brave, Edge, Arc, Dia, Vivaldi, Opera, Chromium, Comet, Helium, Firefox and Zen. Trawl reads the history each browser already keeps on your Mac. Safari needs Full Disk Access.

60 days of your days

The day timeline reads up to 60 days of page visits. Files, recordings and copies appear for as long as they exist on your Mac; copies are kept 90 days.

1,300+ things it can see

Apple's on-device Vision image classifier, which labels roughly 1,300 kinds of objects and scenes. Trawl also reads text in images and counts faces. It does not recognise who a face is.

303 kinds of sound

Apple's on-device SoundAnalysis classifier. Speech becomes text with timestamps through Apple's on-device speech recognition, for recordings up to 20 minutes.

First pass on photos, video and audio

11,165 media files on the test Mac took about 11 minutes and about 210 MB of memory. After that, only new or changed files are read again.

0 files uploaded

Files, their contents and the index stay on the Mac. If you switch on smart ranking, your search plus the names and short tags of the top results are sent to rank them (never the files, never your clipboard). Account email and anonymous usage counts also reach our server.

How quality is tested

Before each release, an automated suite drives the installed app with real searches against real files on the test Mac (for example "photos with a pool and palm trees", "police siren sound", a song by a line of its lyrics, a misspelled document search) and checks that the expected file comes back near the top. It is one person's files, so it shows the app works, not that it works the same on every Mac.

Known limits

• Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later only.
• Meaning search works best in English.
• Photos stored only in iCloud are not searched until they are on the Mac.
• Speech to text covers recordings up to 20 minutes.
• The app is not yet notarized by Apple, so macOS asks you to confirm the first time you open it.

Questions about a number? vince@vincedotcode.com