Automating OCR of iPhone SMS Screen Captures

Hi everyone,

So I often do screen captures of my text messages if they have info I may need later. I work in film production and often work on different projects, each of which has different rates and contact people, etc. I need to be able to search this info later and don't want to use evernote for this.

So I have my mac get new photos from photo stream and then hazel looks at file type (which is png for screen caps) and then the picture dimensions. The unique dimensions tell Hazel that the pics are screen caps and it moves them to a specified folder. Then I turn these into pdf files and combine the pages. I make all the pages the same size and make them black and white. Then i do OCR on them, so they become searchable.

The problem is many of the screen captures I make are not of SMS messages but just normal pictures. So these don't contain any text. I want the pdf pages that don't have any text to be automagically removed from the pdf document. So far, I have used automator to extract pdf text and am now trying to figure out how to tell automator or hazel to remove the page if the original didn't have any text in it. I don't know how to do applescript, just automator, so I have no idea about doing "if... then...", looping, etc...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ben

If there's a certain piece of text that always appears in your text message screens then you can try a "Contents contains XXXX" where XXXX is that text, otherwise, I think you'll have to resort to some sort of scripting.

If you are taking fullscreen shots of these pictures, then I'd suggest using Mr_Noodle's suggestion by searching for the carrier (e.g. AT&T, Rogers, Verizon, etc.) as that will appear in each of your SMS screenshots.