1. Iframe Google Docs Viewer

Jun 13, 2019  Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Note: Cloud Vision now supports offline asynchronous batch image annotation for all features. This asynchronous request supports up to 2000 image files and returns response JSON files that are stored in your Google Cloud Storage bucket. Nov 20, 2015  This Google Drive video tutorial shows how to use optical character recognition (OCR). Turn pictures and pdf’s into editable files in Google Docs.

How to convert text from a PDF or image using OCR in Google Doc If you're wanting to extract text from an image, the Optical Character Recognition feature in Google Docs does a good job of completing the task.How many times have you found an old company PDF or image, and needed to gain quick access to the text within, only to find you cannot locate the editable version of the file, or copying and pasting is failing you? Or maybe you only need to convert a PDF or image into a Word or LibreOffice document, so it can be used for another purpose.Sure you can purchase software that will allow you to do just that, but if you're a Google Drive user, you already have that ability at your fingertips. That's right, Google Docs does a pretty impressive job of converting PDF documents to regular Google Docs.

It's not perfect—it's more an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for PDFs and images—but if you're looking for a means to get to that precious text, this is a handy way to do just that.How do you do this? Out of the box, it won't work. Fortunately, the trick to making it function is incredibly simple. Let me show you how.

Enabling the featureOpen up Google Drive and then click on the gear icon. From the drop-down, click Settings. In the resulting window ( Figure A), make sure Convert uploads is checked. A successful conversion.You can judge for yourself how well Google Drive did on the conversion. In this case, it hit the nail on the head Word-for-word, Google Drive extracted the exact text from the image.

I can now copy and paste that text, without having to type it out manually. That's a time saver we could all use. The one caveatIf you expect Google Drive to successfully open a PDF document, such as a W9 tax form, as an editable document, you'll be disappointed. Certainly you can upload the document and Drive will extract the text, but it will be just that, text.

Iframe Google Docs Viewer

Google Drive conversion from PDF or image is really just a very powerful and accurate form of OCR.Even with that caveat, this feature will go a long way to make your daily workflow much more efficient—especially if you spend a lot of time typing out text from PDFs or images.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.Of all the exciting things Google announced at the I/O developer conference this week, one of the sleeper hits was Drive for iOS. “Sleeper” might be too strong a word — attach “for iOS” to anything and it’s going to get attention — but it’s hard for any announcement to compete for headlines against, the,. Part of what caused Drive to turn so many heads during the Day 2 keynote (aside from the iOS association) was its image recognition capabilities.Drive uses optical character recognition (OCR) to perform certain tricks. This is nothing new for Google — back in 2009 Google Docs could take an image file or a PDF and convert it into a document.

It could also change the orientation of one of those files using its ability to recognize characters on the page. These features were brought over to Drive, but so was basic image recognition.

It might seem totally sci-fi, but if you upload a picture of a pyramid to Drive, you can search for it and the system will identify it based on what Google knows about pyramids. This feature might seem new, but Google has used image recognition in both Google Goggles and (in a tweaked form) Search by Image. It’s not too shocking that Google would bring this feature over to the iOS and Android versions of Drive, but it is extra handy on a platform where you don’t have advanced search tools to sift through your 5GB of data.

The bulk of the computing is taking place on the server side so it’s not like your iPad needs to be able to recognize that pyramid, you just need to have an internet connection so that Google can lend some of its search magic to the files you’ve placed on Drive.I conducted an informal test of Drive’s image recognition capabilities using some resources from around the web, including a couples of documents and then some randomly chosen, generic images. I made sure they were free of any data that might help the search tools identify them (EXIF, file names, etc.) and then uploaded them to Drive. According to Google’s demo I should be able to identify each by a basic description of each of them. Google Drive: 'wtf is that?'

Maybe the image recognition isn’t particularly new for Google but the impressive bit here is that the company was able to cram it into a mobile app, apply it to my personal data set in the cloud, and then have the app communicate with the cloud in a quick manner. Sure, most of the work is done immediately after the file is uploaded, but the recognition abilities and cataloging is nothing short of what we’d expect from Google.Aside from the OCR abilities and the convenience of using my Google account, Drive for iOS is basically an adequate Dropbox competitor. It’s a smooth experience and with snappy performance on my iPad 3, plus I have the ability to choose exactly which files I want to store offline and which I don’t. The app makes it easy to see who I’ve shared a file with, which is great for people in groups. Advanced (and nearly hidden) tools include the abilities to share with people in your contacts list and to rename files.In addition to being an impressive trick, the OCR gives Drive a notable advantage over Dropbox.

That service is able to search by filename and it has some cool features, like the ability to email a link, but the search tool can’t even dive into the text of a PDF. And, as we know, Google is while other services struggle to compete against its user base, computing power, and massive Knowledge Graph.