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I remember having used, a very long time ago, a self-hosted search engine on my library of PDFs, and it was unbelievably useful. I dream about a similar thing that can do OCR on scanned docs and extract text from my also sprawling library of epub and mobi files. If someone builds something like this, with maybe a LOCAL LLM to extract text descriptions from photos and movies as well as indexing metadata for everything…
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I use recoll to index and search thousands of pdfs. Because I always have the author name in the filename I can filter queries like this: Cybernetics OR steering filename:Heidegger ext:pdf It's an absolute power tool.
If your PDFs have Author properties then you might be able to do "author:Heidegger" too. The Recoll PDF filter extracts some of these fields and if I remember right it can be configured to extract additional custom properties too.
This project has been around and maintained for more than a decade! Small footprint, good speed. One downside might be GPL v2 for commercial use.
Imo people should use cross-platform alternatives.
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Evernote will do this, you can feed it a bunch of PDFs and other documents, it will OCR them and make them all searchable. it's not perfect, but you can also add manual tags for things you know are important.
At some point I'd love to further train an LLM on all my PDFs and be able to ask it questions.
I wrote a scraper to download all of the California EdCode from the governments site, convert them all to txt docs and I can ask questions about California EdCode in plain English.
I work in a shared governance capacity that requires us to refer to the Ed code for contractual negotiations and it’s been extremely helpful.