Search technology has really come a long way. If you have one of the latest Macs, you can instantly "Spotlight" (search) a keyword, and it would go through emails, files, and your calendar to find stuff at ridiculous speeds when compared to old operating systems.
But there's still one thing missing. It can't search inside images. So if you take snap shots of your documents and business cards, they won't come up in your search results unless you name them properly. I'm eagerly awaiting the day where text recognition technology in images comes to the consumers.
Until then, I suggest everyone to take a look at Evernote. This software is available on the web, desktop, and phone to let you takes notes, snap shots, and even serve as storage for files. The best benefit of Evernote to me is the text recognition technology. So you take snapshots or scan images of, let's say, business cards, it will become searchable.
The downside is that these images must be synced and processed by Evernote's servers. I am not comfortable with having a lot of business and sensitive documents out there in the clouds so I'm currently not using it. But I am sure many will find it useful and handy.
2 comments:
You might get a ScanSnap scanner. Very easy and quick to scan documents of all kinds, and the software can do OCR on the resulting PDF, so your "image" PDF is in fact searchable.
I love this thing.
(Okay I use it mainly at work in Windows, but there is a Mac version with equivalent software.)
Hi Stephen, thanks for the comment! I actually bought a ScanSnap scanner (for Mac) from a while ago. But the software didn't have the OCR. I'm going to have to check it out. It would be super great!
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