How does OCR search work?

When you add an image, scan, or PDF to a note, Harbor’s server runs OCR — optical character recognition — on it. It reads the text in the file and records where each word sits on the page.

That does two things for you:

• Search sees inside your files. A search for “furnace” finds the warranty PDF and the photo of the serial-number sticker — not just notes where you typed the word yourself.
• Matches are highlighted in place. Open the attachment from a search result and Harbor highlights the exact word right on the page, so you’re never left skimming a forty-page scan for the one line that matched.

There’s nothing to turn on and nothing extra to pay for. Capture normally — scan a page, snap a photo, drag in a PDF, or let a watched folder import a whole stack for you — and the indexing happens in the background on our servers. It even covers attachments your device hasn’t downloaded, so search stays complete without filling your disk.

One plain exception: encrypted notes. Harbor genuinely can’t read what you encrypt, so encrypted notes and their attachments are excluded from OCR and search. That’s the deliberate trade-off — lock down the sensitive things, keep everything else fully searchable. Details in What’s the trade-off when I encrypt a note?

More on search as a whole at Search & OCR.