Filed under: Mac 101
Mac 101: Retrieve your Keychain passwords

First off, open Keychain Access.app (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Once there, scroll through the list of keys until you find the one that you're looking for. Double click on it and check the box that says, "Show Password." Once you authenticate with your user credentials, your forgotten password will be displayed in the text box.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jash Sayani said 10:52AM on 9-25-2008
Thanks for the tip !
Reply
SANTA said 11:01AM on 9-25-2008
Even though "Keychain" is an important tool, I would like to know how to force a website to work with "Keychains" and store the relevant information, enabling an easy sign-in the next time I want to access that web-site.
Reply
Michael Rose said 1:30PM on 9-25-2008
You want 1Password.
B said 1:46PM on 9-25-2008
SANTA;
If using Safari, open Safari Preferences... / Auto-fill
Check "User names and Passwords".
That's it.
On occasion you will hit a website with over zealous security that will not allow saving of user/password, but this is rare.
Nigel said 12:23PM on 9-25-2008
If you want to use a password, and you don't care whether you see it or not, just right-click on the appropriate key from the list in Keychain Access and select Copy Password to Clipboard. Then you just paste it into your browser, or wherever. Saves a couple of steps.
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B said 1:54PM on 9-25-2008
Nice Tip!
frogbat said 3:02PM on 9-25-2008
also - be a bit cautious when using keychain - we had a common password in our studio that everyone knew but if you access private info on a shared or work mac and let it get stored in keychain (already a bad idea), knowing the master password allowed me to retrieve other stored passwords for some work related sites a departing colleague had registered for and other personal passwords!... fortunately i'm a decent(ish) person and let the person know
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Frank Lowney said 3:36PM on 9-25-2008
Sometimes when I do this, I get:
Access to this item is restricted
... even though I have supplied the primary admin un/pw. What's up with that?
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EaglePuncher said 9:53PM on 10-01-2008
So what happens when you forget your keychain password?
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Norman said 11:47AM on 10-02-2008
The more important thing is how to get THE KEYCHAIN PASSWORD back. Since Leopard, you can set it back via the System DVD, i think that wasn't possible with 10.4, you could just set back all passwords BUT the keychain, so everything was still safe ..... now everyone can get your passwords via a leopard system DVD if they stole your mac. BEWARE ! (well i'm also happy about that because i could help a friend retrieve his master password like this, with 10.4 he would have had to delete the whole drive and Install Tiger again)
If this was already possible in Tiger and im just mistaken s1 tell me plz.
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