SharePoint Premium: OCR service and existing documents

Question

SharePoint Premium: OCR service and existing documents

Marc Andre Schröder-Zhou 85

I've a customer with a lot of existing documents in SharePoint libraries. Now he wants to search the documents (PDF files with embedded images) content and for that reason I configured SharePoint Premium and the OCR service for the SharePoint Site. Unfortunately only new uploaded files will be processed by the service. All existing documents in the libraries will not be processed. Due to compliance rules it is not possible to upload all files again to the libraries. It is possible to start the process for all existing files? All recommendations and answers are welcome.

Paul de Jong 806 Reputation points

2024-11-27T20:19:30.7366667+00:00

Nice case.

Is the extracted text (after OCR-ing) captured into the existing pdf file (combined with the original image) + uploaded as a document version to SharePoint or is the extracted text captured into a SharePoint column which is indexed by search?

We use the latter technique for indexing attachments (pdf, docx, ...) of emails stored in SharePoint and that works well (example). This way we do not alter the original file and we can also keep the "modified" and "modified by" details the same. We can also extract pdf properties (like keyword, modified, pdf version, ...) from pdf files in SharePoint and capture the values into SharePoint columns but we do not (yet) supported OCR-ing pdf files stored in SharePoint.

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Paul de Jong 806 Reputation points

2024-11-27T20:19:30.7366667+00:00

Nice case.

Is the extracted text (after OCR-ing) captured into the existing pdf file (combined with the original image) + uploaded as a document version to SharePoint or is the extracted text captured into a SharePoint column which is indexed by search?

We use the latter technique for indexing attachments (pdf, docx, ...) of emails stored in SharePoint and that works well (example). This way we do not alter the original file and we can also keep the "modified" and "modified by" details the same. We can also extract pdf properties (like keyword, modified, pdf version, ...) from pdf files in SharePoint and capture the values into SharePoint columns but we do not (yet) supported OCR-ing pdf files stored in SharePoint.

Answer 1

Hi @Marc Andre Schröder-Zhou,

Thank you for posting in this community.

According to the description in this Microsoft's official documentation: Once OCR is enabled, only images uploaded after the OCR service has been activated will be scanned.

User's image

The only way we can get ORC to work on a file that exists is to do a re-upload of the file. We realize that under your compliance policy you cannot re-upload files, so we recommend that you create a new site and enable ORC, then re-upload (copying or moving is fine) all existing files to this new site.

Feel free to contact us if you have any concerns/queries.

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