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(Archived) Mass Scan / OCR for an HOA


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I love EN for my personal life and as the president of my HOA I would like to bring the benefits to my community.

We have an attic of documents that I would like to get into EN and was looking for a company who I could ship boxes of documents too who would scan, OCR and put them into our EN account.

Does such a company exist?

Side note ... has anyone ever done this for their HOA or business? Any advice or suggestions? I am hoping the OCR will help make all the paper a little more useful.

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I just did a Google search on

company to scan documents

And got a lot of hits. Shoeboxed is one I remember hearing about several years ago. You'd need to check as to whether they OCR your docs or not. WRT putting them into your EN, doubtful. Especially since uploading a lot of docs could easily chew up a lot of your upload limit. But it shouldn't be a difficult or time consuming job to do yourself using an import folder.

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I just did a Google search on

company to scan documents

And got a lot of hits. Shoeboxed is one I remember hearing about several years ago. You'd need to check as to whether they OCR your docs or not. WRT putting them into your EN, doubtful. Especially since uploading a lot of docs could easily chew up a lot of your upload limit. But it shouldn't be a difficult or time consuming job to do yourself using an import folder.

As BNF said, there is a lot out there. Shoeboxed is in the Evernote Trunk.

http://evernote.com/trunk/items/shoeboxed?lang=en&layout=default&source=desktop_page

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Follow up question if he has a premium account the pfs will be searchable. But what if he has premium and shares a folder with others who are nor premium? Will theirs be searchable because he shared the pfs or will theirs still not be searchable.

If not he may want to scan in as jpg I would think

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Follow up question if he has a premium account the pfs will be searchable. But what if he has premium and shares a folder with others who are nor premium? Will theirs be searchable because he shared the pfs or will theirs still not be searchable.

If not he may want to scan in as jpg I would think

Good points. Shoeboxed claims to OCR the PDFs, so that means they will be searchable by anyone.

In general, it is better to save things as PDFs, unless you are dealing with handwritten notes. PDFs travel a little better because they hold everything in one file and they can be easily annotated, read, etc.

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Good points thanks. So in general I have premium, I upload a PDF it gets OCR by Evernote then I share the notebook everyone I share with can search the PDFs? IF I understand that correct that is great!

I don't have a definitive answer to your question.

I was talking about the OP, who was planning on sending his materials away to be digitized. If he uses Shoeboxed, they do the OCR for him, and that means the content is searchable by anyone, because the data travels with the document. In Evernote, as I understand it, they make a separate file with the OCR data, so would they restrict that to Premium users only?

My inclination would be to say that anyone can read it. If, for example, you drop your premium membership today, you can still enjoy the advantages of having your stuff OCR'd (see Podcast #9). Because you would get access to the data as a free user, it stands to reason that other free users would be able to access it as well. In fact, it would be quite surprising if they couldn't. Still, it might not hurt to generate a support ticket and ask your question to customer service. If you do, please tell us what they say!

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Good points thanks. So in general I have premium, I upload a PDF it gets OCR by Evernote then I share the notebook everyone I share with can search the PDFs? IF I understand that correct that is great!

A comment ... I thought I would let EN OCR it but they don't seem to be timely and there is no feedback when it is done and there are rule on when they won't do it ... so, it appears everyone has suggested ORCing the files yourself if you want to make sure they are done.

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Good points thanks. So in general I have premium, I upload a PDF it gets OCR by Evernote then I share the notebook everyone I share with can search the PDFs? IF I understand that correct that is great!

A comment ... I thought I would let EN OCR it but they don't seem to be timely and there is no feedback when it is done and there are rule on when they won't do it ... so, it appears everyone has suggested ORCing the files yourself if you want to make sure they are done.

Not exactly. Evernote's OCR service is great. Unfortunately, I usually fall outside of its parameters (see BNF's link to the OCR details) and I prefer to have control over my stuff -- I want it searchable in Evernote, I want it searchable outside of Evernote, and I want it to be searched using my criteria. For most people (PDFs of business cards, receipts, regular documents, etc.) it isn't worth it to purchase your own software and go through the hassle of doing it on your own.

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  • 1 month later...

HI Right now I feel I am wasting money on Shoeboxed and am hoping how to understand/use it better. I was very disappointed about the actual physical amount of manual work I had to do once I received the extracted Shoeboxed data back. They do not capture urls or physical street addresses. To have complete contact records I thing both are very important for use and manipulation for a number of different business initiatives. And a number of records left off job titles an occasionally missing email addresses. I am considering NOT using Shoeboxed and investing in a Doxie... will my experience be the same in terms of manual work on my part for urls and street addresses?

Emily If you look at my account you will note I have NOT used the account or your services since this disappointing response below indicating shoeboxed does no extract url. Please note on the business cards submitted shoeboxed also did not/does not extract physical address. Contrary to this shoeboxed policy MANY larger reputable Internet. based companies still need and use physical address. Angies List mails as well as emails but could not do so without physical addresses in their database. I hope you or someone there can explain the business sense of excluding url's and physical street addresses. As you can imagine if Ihave to go back and physically add BOTH of these in then I have come to the conclusion that it really isn't that much more work to enter the other card info as well....... which leads me to questions Why spend $360 a year on shoeboxed at all?

Respectfully a once very hopeful but now very disappointed shoeboxed customer

Renee Williams

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Hi. I know of Shoeboxed, but have not used it yet, so I am unfamiliar with the precise details of the service they promise, but it sounds like you were expecting them to go through your documents and extract urls, email addresses, and the like. Did I understand you correctly? If so, where did you want them to put the extracted data?

I use ScanSnap for my documents. It will OCR them, and make the content (with urls and addresses) searchable. So will Evernote. I've found that sufficient, but perhaps I am not using the service / device to its full potential. I'd be interested in knowing more about what you would like to do.

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HI Right now I feel I am wasting money on Shoeboxed and am hoping how to understand/use it better. I was very disappointed about the actual physical amount of manual work I had to do once I received the extracted Shoeboxed data back. They do not capture urls or physical street addresses. To have complete contact records I thing both are very important for use and manipulation for a number of different business initiatives. And a number of records left off job titles an occasionally missing email addresses. I am considering NOT using Shoeboxed and investing in a Doxie... will my experience be the same in terms of manual work on my part for urls and street addresses?

Doxie doesn't come with any software to extract URLs and addresses. As far as Shoeboxed is concerned (though this is not the Shoeboxed forum), I haven't played with it for a while, but as I recall that by default Shoeboxed doesn't extract addresses (as you have found out). However, there is a setting you need to turn on. Once you do that, it should do what you are looking for (not sure about URLs though).

Check under Accounts & Settings, Business Card Settings. You probably have this unchecked: https://img.skitch.com/20120714-bhknkgf2pww7isjr8drfusb6w7.png

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