How to find saved passwords on Mac

❘ Published: 2023-04-07T16:02:28

Need to find your passwords on your Mac? Here’s where all the saved passwords are stored on your macOS-enabled machine.

Grabbing your passwords from your Mac isn’t too hard, in fact, it’s a little too easy. If you time yourself, we think that we can get you there in about thirty seconds or so.

The passwords stored on your Mac will be tied to your iCloud keychain. If you use an iPhone or iPad, you’ll find that a lot of the passwords you’ve saved there will appear in this list too.

This makes it super quick to log into that site you don’t remember the password for, and for whatever reason, the autofill isn’t coming up.

How to see your passwords on Mac

To see your passwords, you don’t even need to hit the Apple icon in the corner. Simply press CMD + Spacebar to bring up the quick search. Then, type in ‘passwords’. You might get something along the lines of ‘passwords.prefPane’, which is the literal name of the settings menu you’ll be opening up.

Accessing this page will require you to either use Touch ID on select MacBooks or keyboards or use the machine’s password to log in. This will be your user account password, rather than the overall administration one.

If it doesn’t appear in the quick search bar, you can go to your system settings. Either use the quick search method above to access the settings app, or go to System Preferences via the Apple logo in the corner of the taskbar on top. Now go into Passwords via the new window and access it as detailed above.

On the chance you’re looking for your passwords on the Mac and Windows versions of Safari, you can choose Preferences from the top bar and Passwords should be in the drop-down menu.

How to find saved passwords on Safari?

Viewing your password on Safari is fairly easy too. All you need to do is to follow a couple of quick steps and you’d be able to see your password. Remember this works on Safari on both Windows as well as Mac.

Open Safari
Go to Preferences on the top bar
Select “Passwords”
List of passwords will be displayed.

Can you trust Mac’s security for your passwords?

MacOS is considered to be safer compared to Windows. Apple not only deploys multiple levels of protection in its operating system to ensure the safety of data, accessing secured information on the operating system isn’t straightforward.

Apple uses iCloud Keychain password management system to store your passwords. Cnce a password is saved on iCloud, it can be accessed on various Apple devices.

However, if you frequently use devices across various platforms, there is a possibility that your data might get compromised. Apple does warn its users against using common passwords and also suggests users to not use phrases that are already found in database leaks.

Be sure to check out our other guides