Can I search inside PDFs and photos?

Yes. Searching inside files is one of the main reasons Harbor exists.

Every PDF, photo, scan, and image you put in a note is indexed by server-side OCR, so ordinary searches reach inside them:

• The whiteboard photo from a planning session — search a phrase that was written on it.
• A folder of scanned receipts — search the store name or an amount.
• A contract PDF — search a clause, and Harbor highlights the exact line on the page.
• The photo of a serial-number sticker you took in the crawl space — search part of the number.

It works for PDFs with real text and for image-only PDFs (like most scans) — those get OCR’d the same as photos. And it covers attachments your device hasn’t downloaded yet, because the index lives on the server.

Two search-grammar helpers pair well with this. The resource: operator narrows results to notes carrying a certain kind of attachment, and quoting a phrase ("grand total") keeps matches exact. The full grammar is in What search operators does Harbor support?

The one standing exception: encrypted notes and their attachments are excluded from OCR and search — Harbor truly can’t read them, which is the point of encrypting.