John O'Connell Profile picture
Counsellor & Mentor for Substance Addicts and/or Homeless. Politics, Motorcycles, Linux, Movies. You can buy me a coffee at https://t.co/JJy5B4vIai

Jun 10, 2021, 7 tweets

Late night tech tip that I’ve just discovered :

if you’re thinking of installing some OCR software on your iOS or Android, don’t. I’ve just been playing around with Google Lens, which is built into Google Photos.

So if you have a Gmail address, you already have it.

@jdpoc … And Google Photos with Lens seems to outperform a lot of specialised OCR applications.

Text at an angle with reflections? No problem.

@jdpoc Some text is straight and the rest is curved? No problem.

@jdpoc Different lines of text in different fonts? Still no problem.

@jdpoc Hand written text on a banner, with uneven height and spacing? Still no problem.

@jdpoc Antiquated fonts drawn by cartoonist? Works perfectly.

@jdpoc In short, Google Photos with Lens seems to “get“ more text in more situations for more images than bespoke OCR software. I’ve only tested it on about a dozen images, but so far it has excelled.

A very, very useful feature.

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