OpenShelf

Read scanned documents, work directly from shelves, and choose wheel actions faster.

New

• Recognise text in images and PDFs. Drop screenshots, scanned documents, PDFs, or a mixture onto OCR in the Tools wheel. Save a text file or a searchable PDF beside each original. Recognition runs on your Mac in supported system languages, and PDF pages that already have text keep it.
• Open the wheel for shelf selections. Select files on a shelf and press ⌃⌥Space, or choose Open Wheel for Selection from the menu bar. A focused shelf takes priority; otherwise the shortcut uses the most recent shelf when OpenShelf is active, or Finder's selection.
• Numbered wheel shortcuts. Hold ⌘ in a keyboard-opened wheel to see each wedge's number, then press the number to run it. ⌘0 opens More or Back; ⌘⌥number opens conversion settings where available.

Fixed and improved

• Shelves follow files moved through the Actions wheel, keeping their order, selection, and selection anchor.
• Command-line tools' final output is captured reliably, including an output line without a closing newline. ffmpeg progress stops when its job ends.
• Video preview frames remain usable after their temporary files are removed.
• PDF image exports render and save one page at a time to reduce memory use.
• Excel output exceeding 1,048,576 rows is refused before conversion. The preflight supports quoted records, CR/CRLF line endings, and UTF-16 files.
• Resize and Remove Background reuse rendering contexts, and Add Background's colour swatches fit their window.
• Child processes receive a limited environment rather than inherited shell credentials.
• Concurrent OCR jobs are queued to avoid stalls on smaller machines.
• OCR cancellation leaves no partial PDF output, rotated pages retain their displayed dimensions, and recognition retries on CPU if acceleration fails.

Thanks to David NeSmith (@djnesmith) for the original features and fixes in his OpenShelf fork. The commit review and attribution records the source commits and adaptations.

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Install

1. Download OpenShelf-1.5.0.dmg below, open it and drag OpenShelf onto Applications.
2. Open OpenShelf from Applications. It lives in the menu bar (the wheel icon).
3. OpenShelf isn't notarized by Apple yet, so macOS asks once on first launch:
   • macOS 15 and later: click Done, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.
   • macOS 14: right-click the app → Open → Open.
   • Or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/OpenShelf.app

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. See the README for how to use it.