The search feature would be greatly enhanced if attached files like PDFs were also searched.

This seems like a critical feature.

This is a feature I'm missing a lot as well. Not talking about OCR, but for Joplin to search whatever text is already present in an attached PDF-document.

Just searching the PDF index only, would already be a great improvement. This is probably simpler than a full pdf search?

As far as I can tell, Joplin does not even search inside a plain text file attached. (tried simple search, and "goto anything" on desktop v1.5.11, no luck) That would be the first step, don't you think ?

For such an action, the file content (extracted text) would have to be included in the database / metadata. Only then would such a search be possible. Laurent would have to comment on something like this, whether such a function would be implemented or not.

It is my understanding that Jop (by default, simple drag-n-drop) adds attached files to its DB, not just a link to an external file. In this case it's a matter of search scope not changes to the DB. PS: you can use opt/alt while dragging a file to your note, these alone wouldn't be searchable

[image] ajay: It is my understanding that Jop (by default, simple drag-n-drop) adds attached files to its DB, not just a link to an external file. In this case it's a matter of search scope not changes to the DB. No, only the metadata. The file it self is in the resource forld. But for perfor…

There exist many open source document search engines, for instance http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html . Maybe, part of this code could be used to build an index for all attachments, whenever an attachment changes. The Joplin search engine can then check the index for a specific GUID aga…

I would like to vote for this feature as well. I create and capture a large number of notes, but I have many others that are lightly noted and tagged but which are used to store important documents as PDFs. If I could search in those, as I do in Evernote, it would be very helpful. Still getting use…

its a long time now but there are any news? Hartmut

Searching attached files

Features

mzguy 14 November 2021 15:22 12

There's this option:

Topic		Replies	Views
Indexing PDF attachments Features	1	509	11 May 2021
Search in resources plugin Plugins	17	3999	4 March 2023
PDF Text Search Features	3	118	18 March 2026
How to save PDF to Joplin Support	33	12199	1 February 2021
Search for attachments via OCR text doesn't work on any platform Support	2	96	13 August 2025

Searching attached files

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