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Author Topic: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots  (Read 7470 times)

Renegade

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Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« on: March 14, 2013, 10:15 AM »
I often find that I want to find a specific screenshot, but they just get lost in the many, many screenshots that I take. They're miserable to find.

However, I know the site or something about the screenshot that is automatically recorded in the text notes. If I could search that, it would save a lot of time.
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bob99

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Re: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« Reply #1 on: March 14, 2013, 11:02 AM »
This is something I've been trying to work out for some time. With mouser's new new captions features it's starting to make it easier.

cmpm found & posted a solution here: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34092.msg320268#msg320268


IainB

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Re: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2013, 11:04 PM »
This is something I've been trying to work out for some time. With mouser's new new captions features it's starting to make it easier.
cmpm found & posted a solution here: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34092.msg320268#msg320268

Doing a search with Agent Ransack works for finding captions.
In the results will be the Screenshot with caption.
http://www.mythicsof...ansack&page=home
Thank you for this. I've read about Agent Ransack before but hadn't tried it. Just did and it found every caption search test I threw at it. And with the export to clipboard or file I can generate about any type of listing I want. Very nice.

When I started to play about with them, it surprised me how tremendously useful the data-carrying potential for JPG/JPEG files was/is.
JPG image files seem to have lots of places to insert data/text.

For example, in the IPTC info there are tabs for:
  • Description (you can put data in here)
  • Keywords/Categories (you can put data in here)
  • Credits/Origin (you can put data in here)
  • Options

Of these, Description has 8 or 9 subfields for you to insert data/text:
   1. Title
   2. Artist
   3. Byline Title.
   4. Copyright
   5. Caption
   6. Caption Writer
   7. Headline
   8. Instructions
   9. JPEG Comment (Not really an an IPTC field?)

In the EXIF info:
There are various Tag fields, not so easily changed by the User.
(Filename is a Tag, so if you change the filename, then you change that Tag's contents also.)

Google Picasa can see all these filenames and fields (all this data) and automatically indexes it all, including the file path.
So you get an instant response when you search for any of it in Picasa. You can thus sort your images/data in multifold ways using various text strings.
There is a function called "Tags" in Picasa, which enables you to use unique linear tags (i.e., not Tags in a hierarchical tree) to categorize your images.
It's really easy to use Tags from the Tags Panel. You can Tag images individually (one by one), or en masse (in large groups).
You can have multiple (different) Tags for any given image.

This is interesting and rather useful:
If you put the word (say) "Sausage" in the IPTC Keywords/Categories Keywords field for a JPG file, then it appears in Picasa with the Tag "Sausage", and vice versa if you put the Tag "Sausage" as a Picasa Tag for that image.

In the Picasa menu, if you select Tools | Experimental |Show tag as album, you can select the Tag "Sausage" and that then becomes a logical album for all the images with the Tag "Sausage". This is in addition to the usual Album category function, which is comprised of an assortment of your selected images or groups of images from your database of images.
Using Picasa you can then send all or some members of an album (whether a category or a Tag album) online to a web-based album in Picasa.

In addition to this, if you have some images with text in them - e.g., (say), a picture of a receipt) - and if you save those images as TIF/TIFF files, then Windows 7 Search/Index can be set to automatically OCR scan these images and index any text found in the image. So you can search for that text from the Start menu.
Refer: Search for TIFF documents based on text content

If you have any images in OneNote Notebooks, then OneNote can be set to automatically OCR scan these images for text, and that text gets indexed, together with ordinary text in the Notebooks, and all of it is integrated in the Windows 7 Search/Index, so it can be searched for either just from within OneNote, or from the Start menu.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2013, 11:12 PM by IainB »

Pm

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Re: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« Reply #3 on: October 15, 2016, 09:15 AM »
If anybody's still following this, I can add that OneDrive Personal - if you sync up annotated images there - will also auto OCR Text notes and quickly find the files you want. Requires Internet connection, but seems quite effective. I have loads of annotated images .. 

mouser

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Re: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« Reply #4 on: October 15, 2016, 09:38 AM »
now that SC has built in filename search/filtering, perhaps it wouldnt be too hard for me to piggyback on that an ability to search/filter text in comments.

Pm

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Re: Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots
« Reply #5 on: October 15, 2016, 09:45 AM »
Can't wait :)