Searching and editing Junk Yard items

Type in the search box at the top of the Junk Yard and the board narrows as you type — it matches the words in a scrap, a file's name and even the text inside a picture. One-tap filters narrow it further by kind, by date and by colour. When you edit a note or a picture, Storage Studio saves the result as a new scrap and leaves the original as it was.

Filters

Under the search box:

A date menu narrows the board by when a scrap was added: Any time, Today, Yesterday, 2 days ago, 3 days ago or Earlier.

Colour labels. Click the colour dot on a card and pick one of seven colours — or none — to group related scraps; the card takes on a soft tint. Once you've coloured some scraps, a row of colour chips appears so you can show just one colour; Clear shows them all again. If you've connected a Bridge device, a Remote menu lets you show only the scraps that came from one device.

Smart find

Next to the search box, Smart find makes search work by meaning rather than exact words, and reads the text inside pictures. It runs entirely on your Mac.

%% caption: What Smart find does with your search
flowchart TD
  A[You type in the search box] --> B{Smart find on?}
  B -->|No| C[Exact matches on words and file names]
  B -->|Yes| D[Matches by meaning, plus text read from pictures]
  D --> E{Apple Intelligence on, and you press Return on a phrase?}
  E -->|Yes| F[The phrase is turned into filters, such as Media and Yesterday]
  E -->|No| G[The results stay as they are]

• On a Mac with Apple Intelligence, the button reads Powered by Apple Intelligence. Type a phrase such as "images from yesterday" or "that link I copied" and press Return, and it sets the matching filters for you.
• On other Macs it reads On-device search: meaning-based matching and the text inside pictures still work, without the phrase-to-filters step.
• Click Smart find to turn it off; it then reads Off · exact match.

See Tuhi on a Mac without Apple Intelligence for more on what changes without Apple Intelligence.

Looking at a scrap

Click a text or picture card to open it in a large preview you can move and resize. Page through scraps with the ‹ › buttons or the arrow keys, zoom pictures with ⌘+ and ⌘−, and press Esc to close. From the preview you can set the scrap's lifetime, pin and colour, and use Edit, Copy, Delete, or Open for a file or Open link for a web address.

Notes

New note in the header opens the note editor. It has bold, italic, underline, monospace for code, bulleted and numbered lists, Insert link and Insert image. ⌘B, ⌘I and ⌘U work as usual. Click a picture inside a note to resize it with Small, Medium, Large or Fit. Choose how long the note lasts, then click Add to Junk.

Editing a picture

Click Edit on a picture scrap to open the image editor. You can Rotate left or Rotate right, Flip horizontal or Flip vertical, adjust Brightness, Contrast and Color, and Crop by dragging the corner handles, then Apply crop. Reset adjustments undoes your changes before you save.

To put a picture from a file on the board without editing it, use Add image in the header. Embed file adds a reference to a file.

Edits make a copy

Saving an edit never changes the original scrap. In the note editor the button reads Save a copy; in the image editor, Save. Either way the result becomes a new scrap that keeps the original's colour, pin and auto-clear timer, and it's copied to your clipboard ready to paste.

See also: Clipboard capture, pins and how long items last · Junk Yard shortcuts · Opening the Junk Yard from the screen edge