Search photos for text

[v-600]

More of a photo question rather than camera but...

EDIT: Is this this right subforum?

I am a teacher, the children in my class take photos of their work with ipads. All the photos sync to a google drive/google photos account.

Google photos is great at searching for terms like "buildings" "cubes" "paper" but struggles with text. E.g. if a child works on a whiteboard and writes their name I would like be able to search the text.

Currently I can search text in a photo using the normal google app/google if its on screen e.g. scan a photo for a phone number and ring it but I don't know if this is happening locally or on googles servers. This works well enough for hand written text if its printed characters (it fails miserably with children's joined up writing).

Does anybody know if its possible to get text recognition in google photos?

Alternatively is there a way to do this on OSX photos (photos search is not as good as google's anyway but worth a shot) as all the ipads sync to a macbook which handles the background upload to google drive?

Or any other ways to achieve what i want?

 

[Gooberlx2]

As far as I can tell, google drive (not photos) employs OCR on images. I tested by downloading some random images of whiteboards with words written on them, then searched those words.

Results worked if the words were clearly, legibly written (printed) and image resolution was good. Crappy handwriting will hose the results, and I don't know that any OCR could help you there.

 

[v-600]

You sir, are a genius. If you turn on the show photos in drive option you can use google drive to search for your photos.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xq9FqVwGOdMmNVLXpBbXI3Nlk/view?usp=sharing

It fails for searches like bricks, wood or numbers but I can still use G-photos for that.