I recently built an app that scans a folder of images and makes the text inside them fully searchable, using Flask and Tesseract OCR.
This could be helpful for anyone who has a massive folder of screenshots or scanned documents and wants to find what they need without uploading everything to a cloud service. This app runs 100% locally on your own machine.
Instead of scrolling through hundreds of thumbnails to find a specific image, you can just search for the text contained in the image. You can use broad substring searches, or toggle “Exact Match” to look for specific whole words.
Sometimes you want to do something with the text in an image. With one click, you can copy the entire block of text to your clipboard. You can also copy the file path to each image.
The dashboard includes a term frequency analyzer. It automatically displays the top 50 most frequently occurring words in all the extracted text, ignoring common words like the, and, or, etc.
As you add new images to the folder, you won’t need to rebuild the whole database. Simply click “Sync New Images” to processes any new files, and make them searchable too.
