Google Drive Removes OCR Feature [Update: Now Restored]

neil on 03/10/2015 - 03:00

I often pick up some good comps from the newspaper which I throw into Drive which then OCRs it. A couple of days ago the option disappeared. Looked all over the tech media, Twitter and Google updates but didn't see anything.

Over at their support forums however there are 2 big threads where a Google Engineer states:

that feature is no longer a feature of Google Drive.

Oh well, just like Reader, it's another great service lost.

I've found that Drive is was the most accurate web based site at OCRing. The other ones I've tried (just via a quick search) don't do so well. Anyone have any good OCR suggestions?

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Comments

  • whats up skip on 03/10/2015 - 08:08

    More Google defeaturing, something they have done many times over the years to many of their apps, but particularly Google Maps.

  • Juvi on 03/10/2015 - 08:19

    Try Evernote -https://evernote.com/

  • 01011010 on 03/10/2015 - 09:32

    does evernote do it on the free version or only on the paid version?

    • scotty on 03/10/2015 - 09:39
      +1

      Evernote makes text inside images searchable but I am sure whether it allows extracting the text.

  • neil on 03/10/2015 - 10:53

    And just like that they fix it. OCR is back in Drive after 2 days of being missing.

    Pretty poor communications within Google.

    • No on 03/10/2015 - 12:55

      Does the OCR happen automatically or do you need to do something to make it process it?

      • neil on 03/10/2015 - 16:08

        You just right click and open the image or PDF as a Google Document.

        • No on 03/10/2015 - 16:48

          Thanks. So after that if I do a search in google drive it will search the text of the document?

        • neil on 03/10/2015 - 19:16

          @daveaus:

          Yep. It actually autodetects text when you upload even without manually converting. It must have some algorhytmn that detects an image that's obvious should be text and not just a photo that happens to have text it in.

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