Find this out by accident a few days ago… that photos in Google Drive are OCR’ed, and that you can search for the photos in Gmail. This is very useful for someone like me, who likes to take pictures of notes so I don’t have to carry them around. And now, I can dump the files into Google Drive and they are searchable!
If your photos have text in them, and they are stored in Google drive, you can search for the text in both Google Drive’s search box **and** Gmail’s search box.
Here is the search from Gmail:
Here is the search from Drive:
The difference between the two searches is that if you hit enter in the Gmail search, it returns only mail and not the photos. Also, as you can see from above, the search from Gmail does not return all the results.
The data flow I have now to get pictures of physical notes on my iPad to Google Drive is a bit clumsy. But I have not come up with a better solution yet. What I do is to first to take the pictures on my iPad. With the Dropbox, I sync the pictures from the iPad to Drobpox. This would also sync to my laptop computer, where I have both Google Drive and Dropbox installed. Because Google Drive and Dropbox both like to reside in their own directories (unlike Sugarsync), I have to write a batch file to move the photos from the Dropbox folder over to the Google Drive folder. I scheduled the batch file to run periodically, and only copy over files older than 30 days.
Here’s the content of the batch file, which uses robocopy. Robocopy comes installed with Windows Vista and is part of Microsoft Windows. You would have to change the paths of the photo photos. The /minage:30 option tells the program to move files only if it is older than 30 days. I also excluded copying any ini files with the /XF *.ini option.
REM Move files from Dropbox to Google drive, that's older than 30 days.
REM Use robocopy....
robocopy "C:\Users\user1\Documents\Dropbox\Camera Uploads" "C:\Users\user1\Documents\Google Drive\Camera Uploads" /mov /minage:30 /s /XF *.ini