Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
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.
22 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
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.
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 ?
Not free but check https://getsearchablepdf.com
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.
- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
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?
Yes, it's all English. I was instructed to enroll for early access here:
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.
- 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!
About View, download, and export
Need support with viewing, downloading, and exporting files and folders from your Dropbox account? Find help from the Dropbox Community.
