Thanks to the advances in mobile photography, photos now make up the largest amount of content that is stored (in terms of data size) on SkyDrive Microsoft’s popular cloud storage service.
And the technology titan has, in the recent past, increased its focus on adding new features specific to photos and images that are stored on SkyDrive — everything from improved visual design to easier searching and effortless sharing across devices and users.
Now the company has integrated its impressive Bing powered OCR (optical character recognition) technology with SkyDrive, allowing users the ability to extract text and images.
Mona Akmal of Microsoft explained this in a blog post, saying:
“When you take photos with your Windows Phone (with auto-upload turned on) today, we send them to your SkyDrive camera roll folder. With this new SkyDrive release, our OCR tool will automatically run on your camera roll photos so you can instantly see the extracted text whenever you view your photos on SkyDrive.com.”
Talk about automated and convenient productivity!
And as the image above shows, the feature is highly accurate, and should be a bona fide help for users that take photos while travelling or shopping — think product labels, signs and objects that contain a fair amount of text.
At the moment the feature only works with a select few languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and German), but on the flipside the feature supports most image formats.
Microsoft has promised that this is one of many in a series of new SkyDrive features that it has lined up to make photos stored in the cloud service smarter and efficient. And that the company has plans to develop this capability further in future releases.
