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T
TzonZ
Participant
August 27, 2024
Question

How can I find photos or images in my Pictures' folder that contain text?

  • August 27, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 326 views

My photos synchronize automatically from my smartphone to my PC. Many images however are smartphone screenshots or photos I took with the smartphone of documets that I intended to use temporarily. All these images clutter my Pictures' library and I don't seem to be able to find a way to delete them all. I did find a way to delete screenshots by searching images by specific dimensions and under a certail size, but some pictures of documents or computer monitors that were not meant to be stored I cannot locate altogether. There are a few iPhone apps that do find images that contain text, but that is too late to use if the files are transferred to my PC. I cannot find any Windows app that does that. Is there a way to use Adobe Elements Organizer to find photos that contain text or just bad pictures in general? 

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1 reply

Greg_S.
Community Expert
Greg_S.Community Expert
Community Expert
September 20, 2024

Your question made me curious enough to try out the Search command.  It is certainly not a perfect solution, but here is what a search for writing uncovered in my catalog:

 

 

Searches for text, blurred and document were not as successful.  It's not clear to me whether or not you have imported all of your phone files into the Organizer.  If you have, it should not be too difficult to scroll through your catalog with the view set at a fairly low zoom, and to select the unwanted photos to delete, using Shift-Click, Ctrl-Click and Shift+Ctrl-Click to multi-select the images for deletion.

 

One other possibility is to use the Find>By Similarity option.  But it seems to me that a manual search through the grid is the best option.

T
TzonZAuthor
Participant
September 20, 2024

Hi, 

 

Thanks for the reply. 

 

For me, the search command does not work when I type in "text". You also mentioned this was not successful. Maybe the tags for the media have not been created or there is no such tag (for text) in Adobe Elements Organizer. Unfortunately that's what I was looking for (to find screenshots or pictures of monitors, documents or text). 

 

Only Find similar works for me, when I select a photo containing text. This seems the best solution so far. 

 

For the record, I use OneDrive to sync all my phone's photos to my PC, so yes, there are many years' files imported to the catalogue. This is also partly Apple's design fault for not separating actual photos from other media files received from applications, eg. WhatsApp (usually silly images my friends send). 

 

I still believe it would be a good feature to implement a photo cleaner function that detects poor pictures, screenshots, and other potentially unwanted images in the library. Apps with similar functionallity do exist in the phone's AppStore, but it's too late when images have already been imported to the PC. 

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