Why do screen OCR tools still write temp files to your SSD and charge subscriptions?

Hey People! 👋

Copying text from an image, video, or diagram is something many of us do ten times a day. But almost every screen OCR utility today either:

1. Costs a recurring subscription for what is essentially a basic OS capability.

2. Dumps temporary image files to your SSD, quietly triggering Spotlight and media indexing daemons in the background.

3. Sends your screen captures across the network to external APIs.
   

I built Byakugan Scan (free & open source) to fix this:

It runs on pure Swift 6 + Apple Vision Framework, reading selected screen pixels directly into RAM (in-memory CGImage buffer) and processing them on the Apple Neural Engine in <50ms. Zero disk clutter, 100% private, and supports 13+ languages plus QR and barcode scanning.

I’d love to ask the Mac community:

• How often do you need to extract unselectable text, QR codes, or barcodes from your screen?

• What’s your current go-to tool, and what frustrates you the most about it?

Would love to hear your thoughts and what features you look for in a daily Mac utility!