Choose a folder of PDFs, type what to find, and I'll read them one at a time. Nothing is uploaded.
Search Across PDFs
Search a folder of PDFs for a keyword or phrase, one file at a time. Get every hit with its file, page and snippet, and export CSV. Pages with no text layer are flagged as not searched.
Drop a folder of PDFs here
Subfolders are included · stays in your browser
Good to know
- This is plain text search. It finds the words you type, not their meaning.
- Scanned pages with no text layer are listed as not searched, so a clean result cannot mislead. Run OCR PDF on those first.
- Text split by odd PDF layout can be missed, so treat a clean result as a good sign and not as proof.
Your files stay on your machine
This tool runs entirely inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent to a server — close the tab and every trace is gone.
These are the free ones — see the full suiteHow big a file can it take?
There is no upload, so there is no upload limit — but the work happens in this tab, which means your browser’s memory is the budget. Nothing here will refuse a file for being large; a big enough one simply gets slow and, eventually, reloads the tab. The figures below are rules of thumb on a desktop browser, not enforced caps. On a phone or tablet, expect a good deal less.
- Files are read one at a time and released, so a few hundred files or several thousand pages are comfortable.
- Hits are all kept for the table, so a very common word over a big set is the heaviest search.
Password-protected PDFs are declined whatever their size — unlock the file first. If a run does die on a long document, splitting it into volumes and working through them one at a time is the reliable way round it.