Search in Text of Images or Office Files

How to setup up fylr to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to write the human-readable content of a pixel-based file into the index, thus making in searchable.

Large files / large amount of files may temporarily slow down your instance due to increased processing requirements.

Some OCR jobs may fail to produce correct output because of source quality (fonts, external artifacts, DPI).

Special characters, pages structures and editorial features (tables, headers, footnotes etc.) are not filtered and may produce nonsensical contents.

By default, OCR is disabled for all files. This tutorial will expand on adding file types.

1. Navigate to Base Configuration, into the File Worker

2. Uncheck "Use Default Settings"

3. Expand "CUSTOM METADATA"

4. Add the extensions you want OCR applied to and written to the index

Example configuration of OCR to include JP(E)G, PNG, EPUB, PDF

The recipe configuration offers more options, those are not necessarily required to run OCR on new files.

Verify OCR is Working

• Create a new record using the plus-icon

• As soon as you save, the OCR is beginning

• Locate the newly created record and open in detail view

fylr detail view of example record

• Use the "Info" button to access the data available in index

• In the "Advanced" tab, you will find the indexed content of the file under "_fulltext"

Info section of a fylr record displaying the indexed OCR output

To search for the extracted content, make sure that the OCR-recognizable text of your files is included in the search result by activating the checkbox in the 3-dot menu on the far right of the search bar.

Now you can find records by searching the human readable content of files - just type in the search bar as usual.

From fylr 6.34.0, a file's extracted content (OCR text and embedded file metadata) is added to the searchable full-text index only when the file field has its expert search enabled in the mask. If the extracted text of a file cannot be found in search, check that the file field's expert search is turned on — and re-index existing records after changing it.

Applying OCR on Already Existing Records

OCR image-to-text will run when indexing a file. Consult Regenerating preview images for a tutorial on how to reindex one or more existing records.