PDF Content Search

To macOS, a scanned invoice is just a picture. PDF Content Search reads the text inside it, so you can find it like any other document. It works on scanned PDFs, photos, screenshots, and plain text files. Text recognition runs on your Mac, and the index updates when your files change.

Subjects, message bodies, and attachment contents show up right next to your files. Open an attachment straight from a result. Or reveal the original message in Mail with one keystroke.

Type "Mueller" and it finds "Müller" too. Accents and umlauts just work. Partial word search helps with those very long German compound words. The app is available in 23 languages.

Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers and Keynote files get indexed too, so your whole archive lives in one search box. Reading these formats needs an optional conversion service that stays off until you switch it on. The file is then sent to our own server in Germany for text extraction and deleted within 24 hours.

Narrow a decade of paperwork down to a single quarter. Then open the preview, where matches are highlighted. You'll see right away why a document came up.

AI assistants like Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code or Cursor can search your documents directly through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). A local REST API is there for your own scripts and automations. Both run on your Mac, without a relay server or an extra account, and stay off until you turn them on.