Microsoft is adding the ability to search for words in your images stored in OneDrive

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the automatic detection of images that are uploaded to SharePoint and OneDrive. OneDrive can detect whether an image is a whiteboard, a receipt, outdoors, a business card, etc. When an user searches for ‘whiteboard’, he or she will get the whiteboard images stored in OneDrive.

Today, Microsoft is improving the intelligent feature to extract texts inside the images automatically and make them searchable.

While at a restaurant, snap a photo of the receipt. You can do this directly from the OneDrive mobile app, Office Lens mobile app, or just upload a photo you’ve taken with your device. Later on, when you go to file your expenses, you don’t have to remember where you stored it, but instead can search for something that you remember about the expense, for example ‘sushi’ or a location.

Images stored in 21 different file formats including “bmp”, “png”, “jpeg”, “jpg”, “gif”, “tif”, “tiff”, “raw” will be supported for this feature. For now, only English language detection is supported.

Text in image search is currently rolling out to Office 365 commercial subscribers and will be available worldwide by the end of 2017.