How to Search Inside PDFs and Images From Finder

How to search inside PDFs and images from Finder on a Mac, why scanned PDFs without OCR never match, and where Live Text helps and where it does not.

1. Start a search from a Finder window. Open the folder you want to search and press Command and F. Finder opens a search window scoped to This Mac. Click the folder name button beside it to limit the search to the current folder instead. Type your phrase into the search field.
2. Add a Contents criteria row. Click the plus button at the right edge of the search bar. A criteria row appears. Open the first popup menu, which starts on Kind, and choose Contents. Type the phrase you want found inside the documents rather than in their filenames.
3. Confirm the PDF has real text. Open the PDF in Preview and try to select a line of text with the pointer. If the cursor selects characters, a text layer exists and Spotlight can index it. If it draws a rectangle across the page, there is no text to find.
4. Use Live Text on an image. Open an image in Preview, Quick Look, or Photos and hover the pointer over any text in it. On a Mac with Apple silicon, Live Text makes that text selectable and copyable. Photos search can also find words that appear inside pictures in your library.
5. Know where the search stops. Finder content search does not read text inside image files the way it reads a PDF text layer. To make a scan searchable, run it through an OCR tool that writes a text layer back into the PDF, then search for the phrase again.