I just tried it on a photo of a fish counter at a supermarket with some text labels on some of the fish and it did very well (printed text, in focus) - so yeah this may well be worth trying!

Tesseract is not really good for text on pictures (non-white background). You can use the free Space OCR API at https://ocr.space instead.

Or, just upload your photographs to Google Photos. Google OCRs all images automatically(!) and you can search them for text in the images. This includes text e. g. on posters in the background.

Tesseract is mainly for documents and generally doesn’t work well on photos but you can try EasyOCR for photos.

For Android there is a old project from Mozilla that just works like a firecracker on whatever size screenshot directory you have :

Firefox ScreenshotGo[beta] https://mzl.la/2NMgD30

It uses Google firebase on device ML OCR (appears to be rebranded as ML Kit).

https://github.com/mozilla-tw/ScreenshotGo

This is the OCR engine used by Mayan EDMS[1] which I've used since 2018. The reliability has been topnotch.

[1] https://www.mayan-edms.com/

>Does it work well on photographs

Usefully, the new macOS / iOS releases will do this automatically (although for macOS you'll need to be running Apple Silicon)