When Spotlight isn’t enough
In short: Spotlight is built into every Mac and is great for opening apps, files and settings by name. Memup is for finding what is inside your files when you only remember what it was about: a line from a meeting recording, a word on a sign in a photo, or a moment in a video. Memup searches by meaning, works offline, and keeps its encrypted library on your Mac.
What Spotlight does well
Spotlight is free, instant and everywhere on macOS. It opens apps, finds files by name and content, does quick sums and conversions, and can find text and objects in images. Keep using it for all of that. Memup doesn’t replace it.
Where Memup goes further
| You want to… | Memup |
|---|---|
| Find a file by describing it, not by its name | Search by meaning: “the contract with the late-payment clause” |
| Find a line someone said in a recording | Speech is turned into text on your Mac, so recordings are searchable |
| Jump to a moment in a video | Opens the video at the moment you describe |
| Search in one language, find in another | Finds matching content across languages |
| Get an answer, not a list | Answers from your files, numbering every source so you can open it |
| Keep it private | Offline and encrypted; files are never uploaded |
Using both
Use Spotlight to open things you can name. Use Memup’s Quick Search, from any app, when you only remember what something was about. Memup only searches the files you add to it, so your library stays focused on what matters.
Try it
Memup is free for up to 100 files, with every feature except watched folders. A licence is $99 once for one person, plus $49 for each extra person. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later.