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How to oCR a whole archive in place, safely with OC Rmy PDF

Process thousands of pages across all CPU cores, updating files only when OCR succeeds.

Short answer: Install OC Rmy PDF and the language packs you need; then Update a file in place with ocrmypdf myfile.pdf myfile.pdf; it only modifies the file on success; use the --jobs option to control how many cores it uses; it uses multiple cores by default. All steps.

  • Life admin
  • Intermediate
  • 1 hour
  • From the README
  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Cursor

data-loss. In place mode rewrites your originals; it only modifies a file on success, but back up the archive before a large run.

Who it is forAn office manager digitising years of paper records into a shared drive.

The problemLarge archives take forever one file at a time, and a crash halfway can leave broken files.

The outcomeAn archive where every PDF is searchable, processed in parallel and replaced only on success.

What you need first

  • Linux, Windows (or WSL), macOS or FreeBSD, or the Docker image
  • Ghostscript and Tesseract OCR installed
  • Tesseract language packs for non-English documents

Steps

  1. Install OC Rmy PDF and the language packs you need
  2. Update a file in place with ocrmypdf myfile.pdf myfile.pdf; it only modifies the file on success
  3. Use the --jobs option to control how many cores it uses; it uses multiple cores by default
  4. Pair it with paperless-ngx, which integrates OC Rmy PDF into a searchable document management system
  5. Swap the engine with a plugin such as OCRmyPDF-EasyOCR if you have a GPU

Prompt for your agent

Write a script that runs ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF in place on every PDF under <archive folder>, logs successes and failures to a CSV, and never overwrites a file when OCR fails. Run it on a small test folder first and show me the log.

Caveat. Speed depends on your CPU and page count; the README does not give throughput numbers.

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Using the Deduped MCP, get the setup steps for ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF and "OCR a whole archive in place, safely"

Add Deduped to Claude Code once

claude mcp add --transport http deduped https://dedupedai.com/mcp

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