scan

Google have today announced some updates to Google Drive which should bring some further happiness to users of their Android app.

The new Drive app allows you to quickly preview documents card-style, as you can on the desktop, which is useful for flicking through images and documents which might not have meaningful filenames. This is just one update of many to the user interface, which has had a refresh and is now nice, clean and easy to follow.

Another update is the ability to scan (ie. take a photo of) your important letters, receipts and other documents and upload them to your Google Drive at the push of a button. So what? Not only can you do this, through Drive’s new Scan feature, but when you do so, Google’s cloud will run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) over the image, which will make any letters, documents or receipts that you upload to your drive searchable.

As someone who already scans my receipts and uploads them to Drive, this is going to be a extremely useful feature for me personally but it will also have a great effect for people who like to store correspondence for long periods of time and don’t necessarily have the filing space to keep physical documents for too long. Even if you don’t use the scan feature, if you’re a Google Drive user this is an update that you’ll appreciate.

What uses can you see for the OCR that has been built into Drive? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

[app]com.google.android.apps.docs[/app]

Source: Google Drive Blog.

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    Peter Massey

    I like the new GUI, although I personally prefer less whitespace. Still no graph support in Spreadsheets though 🙁

    Andrew Palozzo

    I’ve been uploading all my bills and what not into everynote because it did OCR. This I think makes more sense potentially though. I wonder if I can copy jpg’s across on the PC and have them OCR’d?

    Matt

    Yes I believe you can – it’s not OCR at point of upload it’s just Google being able to recognize everything and anything. It’s no different to how you can search your drive for ‘cats’ and you will find pictures of cats even if the file names are all called Dog01.jpg, Dog02.jpg, etc. It will search everything.