OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It is an interesting technology that allows you to extract text from images and fit them in an editable version. It is pretty easy to convert any printed or scanned documents to the editable text version with this awesome technology.
There are many online and offline OCR tools to extract the text from any image or scanned object. But this feature is also available in Google Drive which was known as Google Docs in the past. Google Drive can perform OCR on any standard image formats and turn the images into the editable documents (Latin Character Set only). By using this feature of Google drive, you can extract texts from an image online.
How to Use Google Drive as OCR tool and Extract Text From Images Online
You can upload a scanned object or an image containing printed texts. This utility has been added to Google Drive recently. In the following example you can see that Google Drive has successfully converted the image document into an editable text document.
Setting up Google Drive to perform OCR automatically
You don’t need to use any button or key to extract the texts from the images in Google Drive. It will do that automatically when uploading the image into your drive. What you need to do is to apply some settings for your drive. Here is how to do that.
1. Open your Google Drive and click the ‘Settings’ (gear icon) from the top-right position of the Google Drive UI.
2. Go to ‘Upload settings’ from the context menu and enable the option ‘Convert text from uploaded PDF and image files’. Clicking on this will make it enabled or disabled. The tick mark before the entry denotes that it is enabled.
3. Now upload any image or PDF file at your Google drive. Google will automatically extract the texts from the file.
Once it completes the uploading process, click the image name at your Google Drive.
4. The image will open in a new window along with the extracted text appended at the bottom.
The OCR utility is added to Google Drive but does not work by default. By the above settings, you can enable this feature and get the text extracted from any image or PDF file.
Extract text From Images Online with Free OCR
Free OCR is an another web tool that allows you to pickup the texts from any picture and fit them in an editable version.
The useful features of Free OCR
- All the popular image formats like JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG or BMP are acceptable in Free OCR.
- As it accepts PDF files, so you don’t need to install any PDF to Word document converter in your computer.
- It comes along with various languages.
- It is totally free utility. There is no hassle of any registration process. Just browse this link and upload your image.
- It takes a little time to convert your images into text version.
The limitations of Free OCR
- In Free OCR, you are not permitted to upload any image larger than 2MB.
- If you convert a PDF file then only the first page will be converted.
Though there are some limitations of this free online utility, it sounds good in online image conversion.
Related: Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter.
Good one..