Retrace your steps with Recall

Search with Recall

Maybe you wanted to make that pizza recipe you saw earlier today but you don’t remember where you saw it. Typing thin crust pizza into the search box would easily find the recipe again. You could also search for   pizza if you didn’t remember the specific type of pizza. Less specific searches are likely to bring up more matches though. If you prefer to search using your voice, you can select the microphone then speak your search query.

By default, results are shown from all apps where Recall found matches. You can narrow down your results by filtering the matches to a specific app by selecting an app from the list.

When the results are displayed, they will be listed under the headings of text matches and visual matches. Matches that are closer to your search are shown first. You’ll also notice that some items are listed as one of the following types of matches:

• Close match: Close matches typically include at least one of the search terms or images that are representative of a term in your query.

• Related match: Matches that share a commonality with the search terms would be considered related. For instance, if you searched for thin crust pizza, you might also get related matches that include four cheese pizza or ​​​​​​​a​​​​​​​ vegetable flatbread since there are similarities between them.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Interacting with content

Once you’ve found the item you want to see again, select the tile. Recall opens the snapshot and enables Click to Do, which runs on top of the saved snapshot. Click to Do analyzes what’s in the snapshot and allows you to interact with images or text that is recognized in the snapshot. You’ll notice that when Click to Do is active, your cursor is blue and white. The cursor also changes shape depending on the type of info beneath it. What you can do with the info changes based on what kind of content Click to Do detects. If you select a picture in the snapshot, you can copy, edit with your default picture editing app such as​​​​​​​ Photos, or open it in another app like the Snipping Tool, or Paint. When you highlight text with Click to Do, you can open it in a text editor or copy it. For example, you might want to copy the text of a recipe’s ingredients list to convert it to metric.

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Click to Do will temporarily save content when you use an option that sends content to an app, such as Notepad or Paint. For more information, see Click to Do in Recall. 

Below your selected snapshot, you have more snapshot options. In many cases, you can have Recall jump back into the item, such as reopening the webpage, PowerPoint presentation, or app that was running at the time the snapshot was taken. You can also hide Click to Do, copy the snapshot, delete the snapshot, or select … for more snapshot options.

Pause or resume snapshots

To pause Recall, select the Recall icon in the system tray and select Pause until tomorrow. Snapshots will be paused until they automatically resume at 12:00 AM. When snapshots are paused, the Recall system tray icon has a slash through it so you can easily tell that saving snapshots is disabled. To manually resume snapshots, select the Recall icon in the system tray and then select Resume snapshots, you will be prompted to authorize this change using your Windows Hello credentials. You can also access the Recall & snapshots settings page from the bottom of this window.

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Filtering apps, websites, and sensitive information from your snapshots

You can filter out apps and websites from being saved as snapshots. You can add apps and websites at any time by going to Settings > Privacy & security > Recall & snapshots on your PC. You’ll need to use a supported browser for filtering websites and filtering private browsing activity. For sensitive information, you can use the Sensitive information filtering setting, which is enabled by default, helps filter out snapshots when potentially sensitive information is detected—for example, passwords, credit cards, and more. For more information, see Filtering apps, websites, and sensitive information in Recall.

Delete, delete all, or copy a snapshot from search results

If you discover a snapshot that you want to delete or copy, select … to display options for the snapshot. You can choose to Copy the snapshot to your clipboard or Delete the snapshot. If you realize that the snapshot contains a website or app that you haven’t filtered yet, you have an option to Delete all the snapshots that contain the selected website or app. You will be informed of how many snapshots from that web site or app will be deleted. If you proceed, all the snapshots are deleted in bulk. If you’d like, you can add the website or app to the filter list once the delete is finished.

My device is managed by my work or school, can the IT admin enable snapshots without me knowing?

No. If you have multiple people that can sign in on a device with different accounts, each person needs to make the decision on if they would like to allow saving snapshots or not. An IT admin can’t, on their own, enable saving snapshots on devices that are managed by an organization or school. IT admins can only give you the option to enable snapshots. On devices that are managed you might notice that some options are greyed out and you can’t change them. Your admin can also set policies to:

• Remove Recall from the device or disable Recall on the device

• Disable saving snapshots completely or allow you to enable snapshots if you choose to

• Set the maximum amount of disk space Recall can use

• Set the maximum amount of time that snapshots can be saved on the local disk

• Set a list of websites and apps that will be filtered from snapshots

  • You can add more websites and apps to these filter lists for yourself on your device

For more information about managing Recall on Copilot+ PCs for your organization, see Manage Recall.

Recall as an optional feature

Recall is an optional feature for Windows. It is available by default for devices that aren’t managed by an organization or school.

To remove Recall, type Turn Windows features on or off in the search box on your taskbar. Uncheck Recall from the dialog and restart your PC. Any snapshots that were previously saved will be deleted when Recall is removed.

To re-enable Recall, type Turn Windows features on or off in the search box on your taskbar. Select Recall from the dialog and restart your PC.