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skilled_experts7811
Participant
May 20, 2025
Question

OCR and destinations

  • May 20, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 587 views

I would like to know if anyone has ocr'd a multi page document and used a keyword within that document to put into a destination folder. Any help is appreciated. 

1 reply

gary_sc
Community Expert
gary_scCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 20, 2025

Hi, @skilled_experts7811,  Let me see if I understand you properly. There is a word in the file, let's say "earthquakes," and when saving, you want some function to seek that word and if its found, place that file into the Earthquakes folder?

 

On one level, I'm not sure I'd trust that approach because of the inherent mistakes that OCR incurses*, there could be an error in the text making your auto-save mechanism unable to find your keywords. You do not state if you are on a PC or Mac, but occasionally, I have the same need as you. What I do on my Mac is that I have a 3rd party item of software called Default Folder**. When I perform repetitive tasks, such as scanning, OCR, and image saving, using Default Folder, I've access to a drop-down list of recent folders I’ve used or permanently saved folders that I often need to return to. This is used during saving and occurs very quickly. I am unsure if there is a comparable application available for the PC. Also, if this is so completely not what you’re interested in, I apologize ahead of time for not being able to help you. There are several individuals in these forums who can create amazing scripts, but be aware that no script can successfully find a word by context or meaning. So, if the OCR bungles it, the document will not be found.

 

*I've been doing OCR for over 3yearsasand InI know what can be expected. The success can be improved by using good scanning technques, but many folks are unaware, and/or do not bother to learn these approaches. Nonetheless, there can be errors , regardless of how good your orginal scans are. If you are curious, please check out this blog I wrote for Adobe a number of years ago: 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785435?page=1#M89

 

**I did a quick searconiGooglele and found this for PC: Several tools offer similar functionality, including Listary, Quicksilver, and "Alfred." I have not used any of these and cannot recommend any of them.

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    skilled_experts7811Author
    Participant
    May 20, 2025

    Gary,

    Amazing thank you for responding I thought I was at a dead end. I am on a PC and I will review anything you and others send me to see if I can get a direction. Signing off for today but I will be back at it bright and early tomorrow, I need to get this done. Again, thanks so much. 

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 21, 2025

    Hi, @skilled_experts7811, one quick comment: my auto-correct was pretty bad yesterday. Example: when I stated that "I've been doing OCR for over 3yearsasand InI know what can be expected," that should have read "…30 years…" (how did I not catch that???).

     

    One thing you did not respond to is when and how you expect that this transfer would occur? During the OCR process? During the Save Process? Also, what do you suppose would happen if you had two of the keywords in the same document? How would any automated function process that?

     

    The more I think about this, the more I think you should check out one of the PC versions of Default Folder mentioned above. That gives you absolute certainty of what's going where and there will not be any surprises. Let me show you the two ways that I rely upon DF daily. You'll need to check out the applications I mentioned above to see if they offer the same kind of functionality that I depend upon.

     

    As I mentioned, DF keeps a list of the last 20 folders you've visited. So, if you're in the middle of some major organization, you can easily go to any of these recent 20 during the Save event. If the desired folder is not showing, manually go to it, and it will appear at the top of the queue.

    If you need to constantly go to several folders over and over, you can save them in the Favorites section. These are permanent in the list unless you remove them. 

     

    Default Folder has other capabilities, but these are the ones that I rely upon daily. I also think that these are the ones that would be the best (and most reliable) for your needs.

     

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