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I have about 10,000 pictures in Photos, a few of which are of paper documents (not proper scans). Is there an efficient way to find them that does not involve manually looking at all my pictures? Maybe something that identifies "nearly" B/W pictures? Of course trying to OCR all 10k pics could work but that would take years... Thanks!

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  • OCR would not take years. Apps like OwlOCR have a CLI interface which could be built into a script to OCR to PDF. It is very fast with the inbuilt Apple OCR. At 2 seconds a page it would only be a few hours. But you would still need to search for the ones you want after OCR.
    – Gilby
    Commented Jan 10 at 0:05

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Apple Photos has already OCR'd all photos when creating its search index. Strictly not full OCR, but it has scanned for words in each photo.

Do a few searches in Photos for common words (like 'and' and 'the') and open the Text Found in Photos section.

With a bit more research (trial and error) a search for 'text found' finds all photos where there is some text - even if only a little bit.

You could then create an album called, say, "Text" and drag the photos from each search into it. That should collect nearly all the photos with text.

The above is with macOS 14.2.1. Older versions may have less text searching functionality.

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