> Markdown version of [/magazine/756-tool-showcase-mac-ocr-extract-text-from-images-locally-on-your-computer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/756-tool-showcase-mac-ocr-extract-text-from-images-locally-on-your-computer). Every page supports `.md` or `Accept: text/markdown`. Links point to the HTML versions so they work for humans too. Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Tool Showcase: mac-ocr - extract text from images locally on your computer **By:** [Chris Heilmann](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@chris-heilmann) **Published:** August 25, 2026 [Mac OCR](https://github.com/privatenumber/mac-ocr) is a free tool that allows you to extract text from images locally on your computer. This enables you to find images faster and agents to convert them without using up any tokens. https://www.youtube.com/embed/BnYiSmsxNDc ## Apple’s in-built OCR If you open an image in MacOS using Quickview by pressing the spacebar you can click the icon in the bottom right corner to highlight all text in the image. If you then press `CMD+A` you select the text and can copy it to the clipboard using `CMD+C`. If you open the image in preview you can choose from `Tools -> Text Selection` and highlight part of the image with text to copy. This is an offline feature of MacOS, running entirely on your computer. This is great, but wouldn’t it be better to be able to do that as a batch process for a lot of images? Enter mac-ocr. ## mac-ocr Mac-ocr was written by [Hiroki Osame](https://hirok.io/) and is [available as Open Source on GitHub](https://github.com/privatenumber/mac-ocr). It is a macOS command-line tool that reads text from images and PDFs, and creates searchable PDFs. It runs entirely on your Mac with Apple’s Vision framework; nothing is uploaded. For example, if you wanted to create text files of all the png images in a folder, you can run the following command: mac-ocr *.png -o '[dir]/[name].txt' This now takes each image, extracts the text from it and creates a file. This can be extremely helpful to make images more findable. You can now use the search in Finder to find the images containing a certain text. The search will return the txt file and you know the image of the same name is in the same folder. As you can use mac-ocr in your own scripts, it also makes your images findable and indexable for agents without burning tons of tokens. The only caveat is that this is not a direct image to text conversion. Instead, OCR means that you detect letter shapes and layout. This means that the final text can contain false information and has a layout component to it. For example, it will detect hyphens and add line breaks. So if you want to re-use the text in a different layout, you’d need to clean that up. It is also not a good idea to use this to create automatic alternative text, as this one should describe the image, not just grab the text it contains. ## Related Articles - [Our tools: Text links to markdown converter](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/461-our-tools-text-links-to-markdown-converter) - [5 Underrated Things You Can Do with Preview and QuickTime on Mac](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/612-5-underrated-things-you-can-do-with-preview-and-quicktime-on-mac) - [13 AI Tools You Have to Try](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/219-13-ai-tools-you-have-to-try) - [The Best AI Image Generators so far…](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/211-the-best-ai-image-generators-so-far) ## Related Videos - [Let your iOS app read texts](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/167-let-your-ios-app-read-texts) - [Outclassing Frontier LLMs at Extracting Information](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100303-outclassing-frontier-llms-at-extracting-information) - [Garbage In, Garbage Out: Engineering Reliable AI Document Extraction Pipelines](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100301-garbage-in-garbage-out-engineering-reliable-ai-document-extraction-pipelines) - [From Collecting Bottle Caps 🥤to Building Vision 👀](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/2028-from-collecting-bottle-caps-to-building-vision) ## Related Jobs - [IT System Administrator](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/48290-it-system-administrator) at **Sensory-Minds GmbH** - [Ingénierie en IA Générative d'Images H/F](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/ext/1165767-ingenierie-en-ia-generative-d-images-h-f) at **Comet** - [AI Software Engineer (Germany)](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/48317-ai-software-engineer-germany) at **Sunhat** - [Senior Open Source Advisor](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/ext/1278113-senior-open-source-advisor) at **ZEISS Group** - [Principal Engineer - AI Search & Vector Infrastructure](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/ext/319507-principal-engineer-ai-search-vector-infrastructure) at **Redis** - [Founding Mobile Engineer (iOS)](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/ext/1648532-founding-mobile-engineer-ios) at **Almedia**