logoalt Hacker News

mcottonyesterday at 6:28 PM4 repliesview on HN

A simple example.

I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS.

I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details).

It runs Qwen3.5:9b and glm5.2-ocr with Ollama and uses about 10GB of RAM. It automatically releases the models from RAM after 5 minutes of inactivity so it is pretty seamless to leave running in the background.

All the details are stored in a simple webapp with a SQLite db that I can search through.


Replies

Kirby64yesterday at 7:27 PM

> I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS.

Doesn't Apple do this already within it's OS all locally? It certainly does it for OCR and categorization.

EDIT: Also, no reason to use a generic LLM for this. This functionality exists in something like Immich (both OCR and 'context categorization'), and doesn't tie you into the Apple ecosystem either.

show 2 replies
ern_aveyesterday at 7:46 PM

Would you mind writing that up in more detail and posting it somewhere? It sounds pretty interesting.

show 1 reply
jwx48yesterday at 6:52 PM

What is your M2's total memory? I find this application really interesting.

show 1 reply
tiahurayesterday at 7:01 PM

A new base model mac mini is $900. That is 45 month of Gemini. Gemini 4.7 Flash will give better OCR results that Qwen or GLM w/ 10GB.

show 8 replies