OCR and Indexing

OCR and Indexing is part of Filevine’s Docs+ Features, which also include Docs+ PDF.

This article discusses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document indexing in Filevine. OCR visually recognizes the characters in documents like PDFs and JPGs, making the text in those documents searchable. Filevine’s document indexing also allows you to search the text of document types like DOCX and RTF.

• Enabling
• File Properties Section
• Searching
• OCR Overview (Video)

Enabling

OCR and document indexing is a paid feature within Filevine. If you are interested in this feature, contact your Filevine representative to learn more and to have the feature enabled for your Org.

OCR and indexing can be applied either historically, where all applicable documents already in the Org are indexed and become searchable by text, or moving forward, where all applicable new documents in that Org are indexed.

If you are using Filevine’s legacy 2-way integration with Google Drive, the OCR and indexing feature may not currently be available.

File Properties Section

Once the OCR and document indexing feature is turned on, in your Doc sections you will see an additional section at the bottom of the properties flyout for any applicable file type. This new section is called “File Properties.” If you are uploading new documents, this section may take a moment to appear. 

Once the section appears, you will see “Indexing” followed by a status for the document, like “Queued for OCR.” To update the status, refresh your screen. The document indexing may take a moment to complete. 

OCR

If the document is an image file, like PDF or JPG, the document will be OCRed. When the OCR process is completed, the Files Properties section in the property flyout panel will provide the number of pages and the type of document. 

Indexing

If the document is a text file, like DOCX or RTF, the document will be indexed. When the indexing is completed, the Files Properties section in the property flyout panel will provide the number of pages and the type of document. It will also provide additional metadata for the document, dependent on the type of file and what metadata is available from that document.

Files Types

Searching

OCRed and indexed documents can be searched using the intra-project search or the global search. The text in these documents are searchable using advanced search queries.

If you are having trouble finding the search results you’re looking for, try using a backtick (`) before your search term to change the weighting of the search results, or putting quotations around your search term to get only the results with that exact phrase. Learn more about using advanced search queries.

Search results for OCR and indexed documents will contain all normal search information, with additional information about the number and placement of the searched word(s) in the document. 

The top of the search card, after the document title, will list the page(s) on which the search term has been found. If the search term has been found on more than five pages in the document, then the card will instead list the number of pages on which the search term has been found.

Directly under the title, the search card will show the search term within the document, with the surrounding words for context. If the search term appears multiple times, each instance of the search terms will be separated by an interpunct, or center dot. 

OCR Video

Watch the webinar below to get an overview of what OCR is, how it appears in Filevine, and how to use it.