Install and Run macOS OCR Script in the Terminal

Apple has a very good, proprietary text recognition API. Evan Hahn wrote and shared a little swift script to use it on the command line.

Example 1838 xkcd:

Result:

This is very useful, to OCR an image fast on the command line and – even better – combine it with other commands or include it in other scripts.

But: His post doesn’t contain a clear installation guide. If adding user-installed command-line programs on a Mac is not your daily business, these steps might help:

• Save the script (here or here) to /usr/local/bin and change into the folder with cd /usr/local/bin
• Maybe your code editor added the swift extension. If that is the case, your file is named ocr.swift, remove it with mv ocr.swift ocr.
• Make it executable chmod +x ocr
• use it ocr path/to/image.png