When I migrated from Evernote to Obsidian, the one feature I missed was built-in OCR to allow for easy searching within PDFs in notes. There are a few plugins currently available, but none of them were a great fit for how I use Obsidian.
So I’m happy to announce a new plugin: OCR Extractor. It uses Mistral AI’s OCR (which just released a major upgrade) to extract text from documents, images, etc. in your notes. This does require a paid Mistral account, but it’s very reasonable at a current cost of $2 per 1,000 pages processed.
Following Obsidian’s philosophy of storing data in an open, future-proof file format, the extracted text is added below the embedded attachment as an expandable callout. This means that the text will be searchable via Obsidian’s built-in search, other search plugins, and even your operating system’s native file search.
Here’s a demo showing how it works:
Plugin: OCR Extractor
GitHub: jritzi/ocr-extractor