MITS (Make Image Text Searchable)

Find images by the text INSIDE them using Spotlight + MITS

Watch intro video on YouTube

MITS is a tool that makes images searchable by the text inside them. It uses OCR (via Tesseract) to automatically read the text in an image and adds it to the Comments for that file, which allows it to be found by Spotlight.

Requirements:

• macOS 10.10 or higher
• Xcode Command Line Tools
• Homebrew
• Tesseract

To install Xcode CLT (Command Line Tools):

1. Open Terminal
2. Enter the following command: xcode-select --install

To install Homebrew

1. Open Terminal
2. Enter the following command: /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

To install Tesseract

1. Open Terminal
2. Enter the following command: brew install tesseract

What's next

KNOWN ISSUES:

• Scanning for JPG images only works with images ending in ".jpg", whereas images ending in ".jpeg" are not processed.

TO DO:

• Improve error handling
• Automate installation of Tesseract