Currently unmaintained

notion-ocr: 🖼 to ✍ for Notion

Make your images searchable in Notion!

Notion is a great alternative to Evernote, but one feature that is still greatly missed, is that the text in your images is searchable as well. Notion promises to do this someday, but it's not there yet, so this is the alternative.

This tool allows you to add the words add_ocr below any image in your notion account and it will try to extract the text from the image and put it below the image. Thus making the text searchable.

Install

Prerequisites Tesseract

You'll need tesseract, as it is used for doing the actual ocr in the image.

Mac

brew install tesseract

Without brew check installing tesseract.

Linux

sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

Without apt check installing tesseract.

Make sure tesseract works as a command in the terminal!

Install notion-ocr

Mac

With Homebrew:

brew install yannick-cw/homebrew-tap/notion-ocr

With wget:

wget https://github.com/yannick-cw/notion-ocr/releases/download/0.1.5/notion-ocr_mac.zip \
  && unzip notion-ocr_mac.zip \
  && chmod +x notion-ocr \
  && ./notion-ocr --help

You should see this now

notion-ocr - enrich images with the text in the image
...

You can run it now from the current directory with ./notion-ocr-0.1_mac/bin/notion-ocr

Or just get the latest release from releases.

You can also move the executable into your PATH to make running it more convenient.

Linux

With wget:

wget https://github.com/yannick-cw/notion-ocr/releases/download/0.1.5/notion-ocr_x86_64-linux.zip \
  && unzip notion-ocr_x86_64-linux.zip \
  && chmod +x notion-ocr \
  && ./notion-ocr --help

You should see this now

notion-ocr - enrich images with the text in the image
...

You can run it now from the current directory with ./notion-ocr

Or just get the latest release from releases.

You can also move the executable into your PATH to make running it more convenient.

Running it

1. Get the token_v2 token from https://www.notion.so/

• when using chrome here is some info on how to read a cookie

2. Run notion-ocr with the token

• notion-ocr -t "token_here" -s 10 or if not in your path ./notion-ocr -t "token_here" -s 10
• the -s option specifies to scan every x minutes and can also be left out to run just once

3. In the line right below any image in notion write add_ocr, the next time the tool runs, it replaces that with the text scanned from the image.

Trouble Shooting

• Did you install tesseract? Is it executable from the terminal?
• Did you write the line add_ocr exactly in the line below the image?

Known Limitations

• Does not yet work with handwriting
• Small images might lead to bad results
• Not sure if other languages beside English work right now
• when you get Failed loading language eng you might need to install the tesseract eng language pack, e.g. on Arch I needed to run pacman -S tesseract-data-eng