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Forum Discussion
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.
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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.
so it does not for me because I purchased a family plan ?
How mean… 😒
- Mark
Super User II
It does: https://www.dropbox.com/features/productivity/document-scanner/ocr
But only on certain paid accounts.
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.
Sorry about that -- yes, OCR is only supported for English today and we haven't yet expanded to other languages!
- 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.
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.
D.
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
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.
- 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
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