Dropbox Starts Automatically Scanning Text In Images

Dropbox has launched a new feature that automatically scans the text found in uploaded images, the company has announced. The new OCR feature extracts any words it finds from PDFs, scanned document images, photos of receipts, and more, making it easier for users to search the content. The feature is only available to certain Dropbox account types, however.

According to Dropbox, of the 20 billion images and PDFs that have been uploaded to the service, between 10- and 20-percent of them are snapshots and scans of documents. These documents often contain text, but can be hard to locate due to the lack of search.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the solution to that problem, and is a tool widely available through various apps and software. Dropbox is simplifying it all for Professional, Business Advanced, and Enterprise customers by baking the tech into its cloud platform.

Now, says Dropbox, users will automatically benefits from OCR text scanning in TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, and static GIF images to make captured content searchable. Dropbox points to obvious benefits for this, making it possible for users to find old copies of important documents by searching for things like vendor or individual names.

Dropbox Professional customers will start seeing this new automatic OCR scanning first — it will only work with English text. Enterprise and Business Advanced users will need to get the account admin to enable early access for teams to utilize it.

SOURCE: Dropbox