You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
DBXCommunity
Community Manager
Community ManagerWhat’s new: Scanner App
There’s nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually don’t forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can...
The ones I would be excited about would be photos, sketches, whiteboard, handouts, etc if it means that you can search thru it via search/ OCR/ whatever term you want to use.
To say that you want to digitalize things, to never lose a big idea, never be rushed about losing your meeting notes only works so far with scanned notes. If all it does is convert it to png/ pdf/ etc then it only helps to a certain point. Basically becomes a dumping ground since the more info you have the harder it is to find if you are limited to folders only without tags or the ability to add text notes
Searching within the images makes this very useful. Many times I use notes in class etc but once again it is only helpful to a given point if the OCR cannot search the handwritten text
It would also be helpful if there was an ability to convert images already in DB to searchable images vs finding the paper doc again (if you still have it) & scanning it.
i have not tried the OCR features, but if it turns it to work for your situation, you can snap pictures of your image-based document (already in dropbox) by displaying it on a second screen. so open the document on a computer/tablet, zoom to the largest size, and use your phone to snap the picture into your app. you’d have to page thru the document (what a pain for a long document!), and images might lose crispness, but if it saves time overall, it might be worthwhile.
finding the right document, especially if you have lots of them in a small number of folders, is a challenging issue for me. i try to pack essential “keywords” into the filename, but usually that’s not enough. you could consider using the dropbox searchable comments/tags to store more keywords. the issue for me is remembering the keywords a year later when it’s time to search. google had a feature to index files — i don’t know if they do support that — by installing the google search engine in your computer so you’re not exposing your private files to the world. dropbox should replace their search engine with google’s engine, i think.
finding the right document, especially if you have lots of them in a small number of folders, is a challenging issue for me. i try to pack essential “keywords” into the filename, but usually that’s not enough. you could consider using the dropbox searchable comments/tags to store more keywords. the issue for me is remembering the keywords a year later when it’s time to search. google had a feature to index files — i don’t know if they do support that — by installing the google search engine in your computer so you’re not exposing your private files to the world. dropbox should replace their search engine with google’s engine, i think.
- I have not been able to make comments come up in the search results. It was one of my thoughts as well to create a hack tag system of sorts. Would be greatbidea if it could work
- I’ve read that searching tags only works in the desktop app, but not thru the website. I wonder if the original author who started this was using windows comments and not dropbox tags. in any case, if the feature is not implemented everywhere, it’s somewhat useless for my usage patterns.
- When I talked to support team they told me that search bar still beta phase & search in comments & spaces not supported yet. Tried playing around but can't get it to work on any device or platform but didn't dive further after team info
I will love these ideas once search improves for sure. I am in same boat that if can't use everywhere would create friction
