Have you ever taken a photograph of a whiteboard after a meeting, snapped a picture of a business card, or screenshotted an error message on your computer? While having the image is helpful, you cannot easily edit, copy, or paste the text trapped inside that photograph into an email or a report. Manually retyping long paragraphs from a photo is a massive waste of time. Fortunately, Google Keep—Google’s lightweight note-taking application—features a hidden, incredibly powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine that can instantly extract editable text from almost any image.
How to Extract Text Using Google Keep on a Computer
Google Keep’s OCR feature works entirely in the cloud, meaning you can perform this extraction seamlessly from your desktop web browser.
- Navigate to keep.google.com in your web browser and ensure you are logged into your Google account.
- At the top of the screen, click the small New Note with Image button (it looks like a picture of a mountain).
- Select the image file from your computer’s hard drive that contains the text you want to extract.
- The image will upload and embed itself into a new note. Wait a few moments. Google’s servers need time to process the image and recognize the text. (If you proceed too quickly, the extraction option will not appear).
- Click the three vertical dots (More) icon at the bottom of the note.
- Click Grab image text from the dropdown menu.
Google Keep will instantly strip all the recognized text out of the image and paste it directly into the body of the note below the picture. You can now highlight, copy, edit, or delete this text exactly as if you had typed it yourself.
How to Extract Text Using the Google Keep Mobile App
The OCR feature is even more useful on a smartphone, as you can take a picture of a physical document and digitize it instantly while on the go.
- Open the Google Keep app on your iPhone or Android device.
- Tap the Picture icon at the bottom right of the screen.
- Select Take photo to use your camera right now, or Choose image to select a picture you have already taken from your gallery.
- Once the image is inserted into a new note, tap on the image itself so it fills the screen.
- Tap the three vertical dots (More) in the top right corner of the screen.
- Tap Grab image text.
The text will be extracted and appended to the note. Because Google Keep syncs instantly to the cloud, any text you grab on your phone will immediately be available on your computer’s web browser, making it a brilliant tool for transferring physical data into digital reports.
Tips for Better OCR Results
While Google’s OCR technology is highly advanced (it can even read messy handwriting), it is not magic. To ensure perfect text extraction without errors or garbled characters, you should ensure the photograph is taken in a well-lit environment. Avoid harsh shadows falling across the text. Most importantly, ensure the text is relatively straight and in focus; blurry text or text photographed at an extreme angle will confuse the algorithm and result in extraction failures.