Child Item

PDF OCR with text search

Dropbox Plus. Uploading a scanned PDF, it never gets OCRed to be full text searchable. Chatted with support for ages until they finally decided “oh, that feature requires Pro or above, not Plus because that’s considered image search.” Even though the image search support doc specifically mentions formats NOT including PDFs.

So is that true? A paid Plus account can’t OCR PDFs? If so, (1) Dropbox needs to update their docs because I wasted SOO much time on this today. (2) That’s ridiculous to offer scanning to PDF and full text search but not OCR. And I guess I’ll have to switch to Google.

Find more posts tagged with

View

Web

File Access

OffTopic

Closed - Not for right now

New

Comments

Hannah

Hey @djkdjkdjk, thanks for reaching out to us today.

Actually, with a Dropbox Plus subscription, you should be able to use OCR for PDF files, however, it won't work for PDFs that have text metadata, like scanned or faxed files, so that is probably the culprit here.

Would you mind sending us the ticket number of your communication with our support team, so we can check it out?

In any case, we really appreciate your feedback about all this and I will make sure to pass it on to the team.

Thanks!

djkdjkdjk

Ticket# 22372920
I don’t believe the PDFs had any text metadata, but you’ll find I provided a sample PDF attached to the ticket.
Thanks

Hannah

Thanks for the ticket number, @djkdjkdjk!

If you try OCR with a different PDF file, that does have text in it, but is not scanned, does it work?

djkdjkdjk

Sorry, didn’t get email notification of your reply. I’m not sure I understand. What PDF would not be scanned and also would not have text metadata? Can you give an example? Apologies if I’m being dense. 🙂 Thanks

Hannah

No worries!

Just any PDF file that's not scanned, for example a file that you might have downloaded to your computer through the internet.

dustinek

I have plenty of PDFs that I've scanned from letters, etc, I'd like them to be OCR converted retrospectively. Do I need a Dropbox Pro subscription (I have Plus)? They've not been converted up to now.

Also they're in Polish if that's an issue but why should it be.

djkdjkdjk

FWIW, I finally gave up and switched to Google Drive. Their free version OCRs PDFs for text search almost instantly. Neither Dropbox nor OneDrive was able to for me, which is ironic since I actually *paid* for them.

rhut

Sorry about that -- yes, OCR is only supported for English today and we haven't yet expanded to other languages!

Arnaud_

I just switched from kDrive which has a very very effective scan tool which includes OCR to generate PDF searchable in any PDF viewer. It is available on both Android and iOS kDrive apps.

So I was quite disappointed to find out that a much bigger player such as Dropbox does not feature this.

Mark

It does: https://www.dropbox.com/features/productivity/document-scanner/ocr

But only on certain paid accounts.

Arnaud_

so it does not for me because I purchased a family plan ?

How mean… 😒

BBPWM

I am running into the same issue here. I am moving a legacy document management system file by file to dropbox and hoping it would OCR the uploaded .pdfs. It does not pick up keywords in the searchbar. I am on paid DB standard.

Megan

Hi @BBPWM, thanks for posting here today!

Would you mind clarifying the OS you're using along with its version, and the version of the Dropbox app on this device?

If you have some example screenshots, feel free to share them with us here, in order to have a clear visual.

Keep me posted!

BBPWM

Windows 10 Pro OS and I'm using web version of DB. Think of any scanned to pdf that contains text. If I enter a keyword from that text, I often will not have a result returned.

Jay

Hi @BBPWM, are the documents you're trying to search keywords from written in English or another language?

BBPWM

Yes, it's all English. I was instructed to enroll for early access here:

Jay

Thanks for the info, how long has it been since you uploaded the PDF files onto your account? Have you been in contact with the support team regarding this matter already?

BBPWM

For some files it's been a week. I just enrolled in the above image text recognition feature and will give it a few days. This was the direction of support, so yes, they have been on contact. Thanks.

Walter

Thanks for keeping us in the loop @BBPWM

Please let us know if anything else comes up!

mmx100

Not free but check https://getsearchablepdf.com

Stijn B.

Plus subscriber here. This whole OCR business is not clear at all. I seem to remember from the early days (I've been a Dropbox customer for many years) that there was a time every PDF you uploaded (scanned or not) was automatically made searchable as a standard feature, but maybe my memory is failing me. In any case, I notice now that non-scanned PDF's are searchable (with my Plus account), but PDF's that I scanned with the Dropbox app are not, even if they contain clean text. Why is this ?

Can Dropbox please provide more clarity on this subject by creating a help documentation page that clearly describes the different plans and use cases and for each combination whether the resulting PDF (or image) file will be searchable or not ?

dustinek

6 cents a page for a scan.

Yeah.

No thanks. I have programs to do that which don't try to rob me with another nonsense $10 a month subscription.