| name | local-ocr |
| description | Extract text from images and screenshots locally with mac-ocr, Apple's on-device Vision engine. Use when bulk-triaging screenshots or images (sorting Desktop or Downloads clutter), reading text out of a PNG or JPG, or any time image text needs extracting without spending vision tokens. |
Local OCR
npx --yes mac-ocr <file> wraps Apple's Vision framework, the same on-device engine
behind Preview's copy-paste. It runs fully local, costs nothing, needs no API key,
and ships a prebuilt binary via npm — no Xcode or Swift toolchain. Despite the name
there is no brew tap; npx --yes mac-ocr is the working invocation.
Use it for bulk triage. Fall back to model-based OCR (the Read tool) only for images
mac-ocr cannot parse — handwriting, heavy stylization — or when the task needs
layout or semantic understanding beyond raw text.
Spaced file paths
The Bash tool's sandbox has an intermittent bug with literal spaced paths:
"Screenshot 2026-01-01 at 9.35.00 AM.png" fails to open even when the path is
correct, and dangerouslyDisableSandbox: true does not help.
Always cd into the directory and use a glob or a variable instead of typing the
literal spaced path:
cd ~/Desktop && for f in Screenshot*9.35*; do npx --yes mac-ocr "$f"; done
