Evernote now finds photos with no text in them
September 7 2026 | Issue 111 | Link to this issue | Subscribe
Hi Reader –
Back in February I walked through Evernote's four search methods. Underneath all of them sits the same quiet machinery: indexing. It runs the moment you put something into your account, and you never see it happen.
For most of Evernote's life that machinery had one layer. OCR reads the text it can find – typed notes, the words in a screenshot, the scan of a receipt, text in PDFs, even your handwriting if it's legible enough.
Here's an example from an image in my own account:
That's me at YNAB's FanFest in New York last month. The words on the wall behind us are in the image, so OCR indexed them. I can search for "never worry about money again" and this note comes back with my search term highlighted in the image.
Then at the beginning of 2026 Evernote added a second layer. Semantic Search maps the meaning of your notes on top of that OCR text, so you can surface a note by concept when the exact words have left you. So, searching for "event I attended in NYC last month" will surface my FanFest notes, even though I never typed that phrase anywhere.
Both layers need the same thing to work with: text. Something has to have been typed or written down and appear in the image.
Look at the other two photos in that same FanFest note. I'm pictured with two Academy members I met at the event. There's no text in them for Evernote to index.
Historically, Evernote had nothing to work with on images like those. You could store them, but you couldn't find them unless you'd titled the note well, had key words in the body of the note, or remembered where you filed it.
But now (as of v11.32.5) we have automatic image captions. They're a new layer, and it's the one built for pictures with no words in them.
What Image Captions Do
When you add an image to a note, Evernote now generates a short written description of what's in it – even if the image has no text in it. Here's an example:
The caption that Evernote generated –"A modern kitchen features a central white and wood island with three black bar stools, illuminated by four black pendant lights above." – gets indexed just like any other text in your account, which means both of the other two layers can finally see the picture.
Every caption word is now searchable. That photo is findable by "wood island" or "pendant lights" – details you didn't have to add to the in the note title when you created it.
Seeing and Editing a Caption
Captions are turned on by default (you can turn it off in Settings → AI → Features) and are applied to new images you add and images that already exist in your account. If you aren't seeing the caption, choose the Show caption icon in the image toolbar. Click it again to hide. The caption stays indexed either way.
The caption which is generated by AI can be edited. With the caption visible, click into the caption text and type. Whatever you write is indexed the same as the generated text, so the caption is where you put the words Evernote can't know – that it's the house on Maple Street, or the names of the two people in the photo.
🧠 Academy Members: See a live demo of this new image caption feature in this client tutorial.
This feature is a great addition that helps you find even more of what you're looking for, more quickly, inside Evernote – without a lot of extra work on your part.
Cheers to your productivity –
Stacey
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