Thanks to Lens’s optical character recognition module, Google Photos is able to extract the text displayed on an image.
Taking a picture of a document to keep a copy has become a common practice for anyone with a smartphone. However, very often, the documents thus photographed end up lost in the middle of hundreds, even thousands of other photographs in the gallery of your smartphone.
However, if your Camera Roll automatically syncs with Google Photos, finding a photographed document is almost a snap. The application now knows how to find a photo from the text it contains. In other words, you now only need to type one or more words displayed on an image to find the photographed document.
This new function complements the artillery of Google Lens, an image recognition technology that the Mountain View firm has integrated into Google Photos and which, thanks to artificial intelligence, can identify objects, animals, and much more. more. But this integration offers another possibility: that of directly extracting the text displayed on an image using optical character recognition.
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1. Search for a document
Launch Google Photos on your smartphone then, in the search field, enter one or more words that might appear in one of your documents. All results that might match your document are displayed.
2. Analyze the image with Google Lens
Display the image of the document from which you want to extract the text, optionally zoom in on the area that interests you and press the Google Lens icon displayed in the toolbar.
3. Get the text
Then tap the magnifying glass icon to access other Google Lens tools. Select the icon for text on a document and touch the text box you want to extract. Then adjust your selection and press Copy Text.
You will then just have to paste it into the document where you want to use it.