How do I extract text from images in terminal?

Question

I know how to extract text from images using preview.app, however I would like to use this feature from terminal to extract all the text from a bunch of images. I tried this using this method to apply same operation to multiple images but it doesn't work (it select text from only one image at time).

I also tried converting the images into one pdf, but the text selection doesn't work anymore.

I found no macOS apps or utilities I could use for extract the text from my image(s) from terminal.

Right now I used the proprietary Apple's text recognition machine learning new capabilities (on macOS and iOS, here it's explained how to use their Vision framework).

Any idea?

Answer 1

In terminal:

brew install tesseract <- this installs the program you need (I assume that you have brew installed, if not, go to this website: https://brew.sh/).

For one image you do this: tesseract my.png textfile

And you get a textfile.txt from that image. It should work with other image formats as well.

In order to loop over all images in some directory, you can do this:

for x in ~/Desktop/*.png; do
    tesseract ${x} ${x} 
done

In this case I am looping over all the png images on my Desktop and creating a .txt file for each one of them.

If you want more formats you can specify them like so:

~Desktop/(*.png|*.jpeg|*.jpg|*.bmp)

Answer 2

I did this using Shortcuts on Mac OS, creating the following shortcut:

Then executing the shortcut from the command line or a script:

shortcuts run "extract_text_from_image" -i input.png -o output.txt

I played with Tesseract too, but it seems more focused on the traditional OCR case (extract text from a scanned document or book), this method seems to do way better extracting random text from images.