Extract OCR text from Evernote

Question

Evernote does OCR on the images you save to it. Is there a way to get the full text equivalent for an image in Evernote, or is the OCR only for searching?

Answer 1

Evernote API has functionality to get text and rectangle where this text is present inside the image. See http://evernote.com/about/developer/api/evernote-api.htm, check out "Evernote Recognition Index XML Format" and functions to retrieve it. Problem is that they don't do traditional OCR ... their OCR algorithm may produce different words for single "word" on image. All they use it for is search, so this is fine for them, but not fine for using it as a recognition engine. (Although they give you weight for each word alternative, so maybe you can use that)

Answer 2

Also, Evernote apparently doesn't decide a particular image is equivalent to exactly one word - e.g., Evernote doesn't determine that a particular image is "clue" and is not "due". Rather, it will track both, and a search for either would return the same image. Hence, there's no way to get a full-text equivalent because Evernote isn't deciding what the full text actually is, only what it could be.

Answer 3

evernote pays a decent sum to the creator of the ocr-stuff OR paid a decent sum to put something working together. thus, i really doubt that they will let you get the extracted text (+ positioning on the image).

(could be a business model, to scan other peoples images and provide good ocr :))

so, the answer is: no.

Answer 4

I'm not sure how much sophistication you need, but since I also use Adobe Acrobat, I just right click on my Evernote attachment to open with Acrobat.

Then from within Acrobat I select "Document|OCR text recognition", then save the document as plain text.

This works well for me since I only need an occasional OCR conversion.

Answer 5

If you could get all the images out of Evernote, you could do the OCR with Google Docs.

You can upload a folder of images to Google Docs and have them converted to Documents, which will contain both the image and the OCRed text.

You can then batch-download all of these documents as plain text, which will strip out the image.

If you name all the Evernote images with a hash (e.g. md5), it should be easy to link up plain text files downloaded from Google Docs with the original image.

Answer 6

I'm on Windows and use Adobe Acrobat Pro and Word so I do the following:

1. if file is not saved as a JPG then click the eyeball icon in the upper left corner of the image in Evernote to open it in Photo Viewer and click File > "Make a Copy" to save as a JPG
2. browse to the image file in Explorer
3. right-click on it and select Convert to Adobe PDF (file will open in Acrobat)
4. click File > Save As and select Rich Text Format from the "Save as type" dropdown to save as a rich text file (takes a minute to process file)
5. browse to the RTF file in Explorer and double-click to open in Word
6. edit as necessary