Find the Datashare application on your computer and run it locally on your browser.
Once Datashare is installed, go to 'Finder' > 'Applications', and double-click on 'Datashare':
A Terminal window called 'Datashare.command' opens and describes the technical operations going on during the opening:
⇒ Important: Keep this Terminal window open as long as you use Datashare.
Once the process is done, Datashare should now automatically open in your default internet browser. If it doesn’t, type 'localhost:8080' as a URL in your browser.
Datashare must be accessed from your internet browser (Firefox, Chome, etc), even though it works offline without Internet connection (see FAQ: ).
These pages will help you set up and install Datashare on your computer.
Install Datashare
The installer will take care of checking that your system have all the dependencies to run Datashare. Because this software use Apache Tesseract (to perform Optical Character Recognition, OCR) and Mac doesn't support them out-of-box, heavy dependencies must be downloaded. If your system have none of those dependencies, the first installation of Datashare can take up to 30 minutes.
Homebrew (if neither Homebrew or MacPorts are installed)
Apache Tesseract with MacPorts or Homebrew
Java JRE 17
Datashare executable
Note: Previous versions of this document referred to a "Docker Installer". We do not provide this installer anymore but Datashare is still and supported with Docker.
Installation fails:
Error while installing Homebrew or MacPorts: you can manually install first and then restart the installer.
"System Software from application was blocked from loading" : Check in your Mac's "System Settings" > "privacy & security" if you have a section with this mention "System software from application 'Datashare' was blocked from loading" or something similar related to Datashare. If you have this section you'll have to click "Allow" to be able to install datashare.
For any other issue check our or with your setup (macOs version) and installer logs (Command+L when the installer is launched and failed).
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Download Datashare
Go to and click 'Download for Mac'.
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You can now .
Add documents to Datashare
Datashare provides a folder on your Mac to collect documents you want to have in Datashare.
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Find your Datashare folder on your Mac
Open your Mac's 'Finder' by clicking on the blue smiling icon in your Mac's 'Dock':
Start the installer
In Finder, go to your 'Downloads' directory and double-click 'datashare-X.Y.Z.pkg':
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Go through the Datashare Installer
Click 'Continue', 'Install', enter your password and 'Install Software':
The installation begins. You see a progress bar. It stays a long time on "Running package scripts" because it is installing XCode Command Line Tools, MacPort, Tesseract OCR, Java Runtime Environment and finally Datashare.
You can see what it actually does by typing command+L: it will open a window which logs every action made.
On the menu bar at the top of your computer, click 'Go' and 'Home' (the house icon):
You will see a folder called 'Datashare':
If you want to quickly access it in the future, you can drag and drop it in 'Favorites' on the left of this window:
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Add documents to your Datashare folder on your Mac
Copy or drop the documents that you want to add to Datashare in this Datashare folder.
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Launch Datashare
Open your Applications. You should see Datashare. Double-click on it:
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In the menu, in 'Tasks', open 'Documents'
Expand the menu on the left:
Expand the menu
In 'Tasks', open 'Documents':
On the top right, click the 'Plus' button:
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Choose your options
Select the project in Datashare where you want to add your documents. The Default project, which is automatically created, is selected by default.
Select the folder or sub-folder on your computer in your 'Datashare' directory containing the documents you want to add. The entire 'Datashare' directory will be added by default.
Choose the language of your documents if you don't want Datashare to guess it automatically.
Note: If you choose to also extract text from images (at the next option), you might need to install the appropriate language package on your system. Datashare will tell you if the language package is missing. Refer to the documentation to know .
Extract text from images/PDFs with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Be aware the indexing can take up to 10 times longer.
Skip already indexed documents if you'd like.
Click 'Add'
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Watch the progress of your document addition
Two extraction tasks are now running:
The first is the scanning of your Datashare folder - it sees if there are documents to analyze. It is called 'Scan folders'.
The second is the indexing of these files. It is called 'Index documents'.
Note: It is not possible to '' while these two tasks are still running. You won't have the entities (names of people, organizations, locations and e-mail addresses) yet. To get these, once your document addition is finished, please follow the steps to '.
But you can start searching in your documents without having to wait for all tasks to be done.
