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Comment by ryantuck | Hacker News Reader

Went down this rabbit hole a few months ago seeing whether it was at all possible to disable the automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS.

Wasn't able to figure out how to do so but this blog was absolutely the best resource for digging one layer deeper on all things Spotlight-related, highly recommend.

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Haven't tested this, but try:

System Settings > General > Language & Region > Live Text

"Select text in images to copy or take action."

I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.

It could be even more useful if performed on demand, e.g. long-press on photo region with text.

Isnt that exactly how it works?

From the first message in this thread:

  automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS

If OCR was deferred until user request/consent, it would eliminate the battery/performance cost of speculative image analysis.

The first message in the thread isn't the definition of the actual feature.

What's the best way to disable all MacOS image processing background services?

There isn't any such service; it's on demand.

These macOS services appear to be related to image processing:

  photoanalysisd 
  mediaanalysisd
  com.apple.photos.backgroundAnalysisService

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