Enhancement: read scans and photos on Windows with the OCR built into Windows, as the Mac already does

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#498 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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@MickyG03 is already working on this.

Since Oct 16, 2026.

  • #501 by @MickyG03 — open

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
28/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
powershell, typescript
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start from macOcr.ts, which already handles OCR for scans and photos on Mac, and find where the Windows path would plug in alongside it. The refusal message for scanned PDFs is the entry point for the no-text case. Also update README and FEATURES.md, which list scans as Mac only. Done means a scanned PDF and a photo on Windows 10/11 produce searchable text through PowerShell 5.1. Pull request #501 is already open against this issue, so check it before starting.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement
Problem / motivation

On Windows 11, a business owner who adds a scanned receipt, a signed contract or a phone photo of a supplier invoice to Memory & Knowledge gets nothing the team can search.

A scanned PDF is refused: "This PDF has no text in it. It's probably a scan or a photo, and scans can only be read on a Mac."
A photo (JPG, PNG) is stored, but with no text, so asking Kelly or Oscar for "the Sysco invoice from March" finds nothing.
For the owners this app is for, a lot of paperwork is exactly this: receipts, delivery notes, handwritten order forms, signed paper. Windows 11 ships with every release, but README and FEATURES.md still list "scans or photos" as Mac only.

Proposed solution

Windows 10 and 11 already ship the two pieces macOcr.ts gets from macOS: an OCR engine and a PDF page renderer. Both are reachable from Windows PowerShell 5.1, which every Windows 10 and 11 machine has. So the reasoning in macOcr.ts for not bundling Tesseract holds on Windows too: nothing to download, bundle or install.

Screenshot, mockup or recording
Image
Alternatives considered

No response

Area

Office floor / avatars

Pre-flight
  • I attached a screenshot, mockup or recording above.
  • I searched existing issues and discussions, and this isn't a duplicate.
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
273
Forks
211
Avg merge
2d 18h
Merged PRs (30d)
385

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