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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.
- Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Hey djkdjkdjk, thanks for reaching out to us today.
Actually, with a Dropbox Plus subscription, you should be able to use OCR for PDF files, however, it won't work for PDFs that have text metadata, like scanned or faxed files, so that is probably the culprit here.
Would you mind sending us the ticket number of your communication with our support team, so we can check it out?
In any case, we really appreciate your feedback about all this and I will make sure to pass it on to the team.
Thanks!
- Ticket# 22372920
I don’t believe the PDFs had any text metadata, but you’ll find I provided a sample PDF attached to the ticket.
Thanks
I just switched from kDrive which has a very very effective scan tool which includes OCR to generate PDF searchable in any PDF viewer. It is available on both Android and iOS kDrive apps.
So I was quite disappointed to find out that a much bigger player such as Dropbox does not feature this.
- Mark
Super User II
It does: https://www.dropbox.com/features/productivity/document-scanner/ocr
But only on certain paid accounts.
so it does not for me because I purchased a family plan ?
How mean… 😒
Not free but check https://getsearchablepdf.com
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 ?
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.
