Dropbox search capabilities have been given a significant boost for the second time in as many months. The company says that it can now search for text inside PDFs and even image files like JPG and PNG …
Dropbox search became much more powerful last month, when the company deployed a new engine based on machine learning. The company says that it is now bringing optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities to search for the first time.
The Verge notes that the feature is, however, limited to the more expensive subscription tiers.
So now, when a user searches for English text that appears in one of these files, it will show up in the search results.
It uses the same technology first deployed in the company’s mobile app last year. If you used the app to photograph a document, it would run OCR at the same time, pulling out the text. But that only worked on a small subset of your documents.
By implementing OCR capabilities directly into the search engine, Dropbox can now search text within all of your PDF and image files, no matter how they were scanned or photographed.
The company says this new Dropbox search feature will make a huge difference to users.
The company says that the computing-intensive nature of the OCR process within Dropbox search means that it did need to impose one important limitation.
My colleague Bradley Chambers recently explained the three reasons he left Dropbox for iCloud Drive and never looked back. Personally, however, Dropbox remains my primary cloud storage, mostly because I find it syncs far faster than any of the many alternatives I’ve tried.
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