How to Search Inside PDFs and Images From Finder
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
Step by step
Start a search from a Finder window
Open the folder you want to search and press Command and F. Finder opens a search window scoped to This Mac. Click the folder name button beside it to limit the search to the current folder instead. Type your phrase into the search field.
Note: Command and F means search here and find-and-replace elsewhere. The same keystroke has meant two things for decades.Add a Contents criteria row
Click the plus button at the right edge of the search bar. A criteria row appears. Open the first popup menu, which starts on Kind, and choose Contents. Type the phrase you want found inside the documents rather than in their filenames.
Note: If Contents is missing from that menu, choose Other and find it in the full attribute list. Apple hides the good ones there.Confirm the PDF has real text
Open the PDF in Preview and try to select a line of text with the pointer. If the cursor selects characters, a text layer exists and Spotlight can index it. If it draws a rectangle across the page, there is no text to find.
Note: A scan is a picture of a page. No OCR pass, no text layer, no match. File size will not tell you which you have.Use Live Text on an image
Open an image in Preview, Quick Look, or Photos and hover the pointer over any text in it. On a Mac with Apple silicon, Live Text makes that text selectable and copyable. Photos search can also find words that appear inside pictures in your library.
Note: Live Text needs Apple silicon. On an Intel Mac it is simply absent, and no setting will summon it.Know where the search stops
Finder content search does not read text inside image files the way it reads a PDF text layer. To make a scan searchable, run it through an OCR tool that writes a text layer back into the PDF, then search for the phrase again.
Note: Everyone assumes the machine reads pictures. It reads indexes. That distinction has survived every rebrand of desktop search.