You can disable Live Text in Language & Region settings, but what exactly does that do? Does it also block Visual Look Up, or connection to Apple?
Live Text
We’re in the midst of a drought in the UK. We’ve all been recommended to delete old emails and photos to economise of water use. Is that wise?
How to find images containing objects recognised by Visual Look Up, and text by Live Text, using Spotlight, mdfind and in an app.
How images have text recognised within them as Live Text, and objects of interest are classified, using VisionKit, mediaanalysisd, Espresso, the ANE and more.
macOS gained Live Text and Visual Look Up when Apple declared its intent to check our images. Both are used in Spotlight’s indexes, but their function seems unreliable and highly variable.
When you start your Mac up, the fans blow full on, and you see CGPDFServices taking lots of CPU %. Is this malware? No, but it’s new in Sonoma.
Searching the text content of PDF documents often doesn’t work well, sometimes not at all. And recovering what you can see is text can also fail miserably.
Does macOS use Live Text to extract and index recognisable text in images? Is that a good or bad thing if it did? What about PDFs?
Text can be searched by eavesdroppers and crawlers to discover its content and extract it for other purposes. How to make their task more difficult using Unicode.
Does Sonoma analyse and classify your images? What content does it obtain from them? How to discover what search terms it recognises? And could this be used to detect CSAM?
The Eclectic Light Company 