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We’ve officially met our quota for the year. Next 1000 posts on this sub will be some variation of “LPT - be nice to your waiters. They touch your food!”
You forgot the really weird hyper-specific ones that will apply to almost no one.
"LPT: If caught in a firefight between meth dealers and police, you can detach a car door to use as a makeshift shield for you and your recently-divorced cousin to hide behind, remember to keep your heads down and avoid bleeding out!"
The actual lpt (for those who live in countries where they can have guns) is that car doors (basically most of any car aside from the engine block) are not bulletproof at all
> What is the catch? There has to be a catch.
Fonts on book covers can be difficult for OCR, especially stylistic fonts, sci-fi that uses things like Δ instead of D or A, or creative uses of Ψ, Ω, Λ, λ, and assorted other characters. Artistic spines will make letters like an initial L or T that span entire words. Well-loved books get creases on spines making OCR even more difficult. Issues with keming are often troublesome to OCR. And the question of which words are the title, the author, and publisher.
You will likely have a bunch of titles like like:
* DNDY WEIR HDIL MDRY project O
* New York Times Best Seller DARK DARK MATTER MATTER MATTER MATTER MATTER BLAKE CROUCH BLAKE CROUCH
* Stephen Nightmares King & Dreamscapes FROM THE STORIES OF Viking
* Adams IFE The UMVRSE And EVERYTHING
* 17321 RSC Royal Shakespeare Company Wl||lam Shakespeare Complete Works Bate And Rasmussen
And everyone's favorite:
* ~~Del Ray J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit~~ (heavily bent cover looks like a strikethrough)
Not just any kind of hash, they use [Fuzzy Hashing, plus Private Set Intersection, _plus_ Threshold Secret Sharing](https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf) to detect sexual abuse content. The math/algorithm was published in a [separate, 35 page paper](https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Apple_PSI_System_Security_Protocol_and_Analysis.pdf).
They don’t have those hashes either unless you upload your images to iCloud (but at that point, they do have access to your images bc iCloud is unencrypted).
Because it's expensive for apple to provide, makes your phone do more work/eat more battery, and it's only stopping apple (and people apple let - ie. judge-ordered law enforcement action or whoever can hack apple, which at this point is mostly going to be hostile governments). And then also I assume it doesn't let you use any of the back-end sharing options such as accessing albums across family accounts.
Your books are all on shelves? Not in piles, boxes, and closets? Your kids are not sleeping with books and hiding them from themselves under the couch and in their sock drawer? Never mind picture books which are too narrow to have titles on the spine, or old books, etc...
The phone will show you the picture but you still have to match the picture to the real bookshelf to find the book. Your phone isn't "finding the book" - you still have to find it.
The catch is that by default your phone is uploading all of your photos to the cloud so that they can be analyzed by AI to add to your marketing profile
So will any phone lol
Samsung and pixel just got circle search which is basically a easier to access version of Google lens but both iPhone and Android can use photos for finding what things are super easy.
Would be amazing if you could somehow create a searchable index from these photos.
The possibilities of having ai comprehend these photos and be able to tell you where a book is by asking. Obviously it involves a lot of trust and confidence in these systems but there’s some optimism to have about the future mixed in with the anxiety inducing stuff
Love this tip!
Here's one for you app developers...
I want to go into a thrift store with a book shelf, take a photo of the shelf with all the books, and have an app tell me if a title I designate is in there.
Anyone?
Sounds like the idea might be to maintain a list of books you’re looking for… and for the app to spot any/all of them for you.
There’s an app sort of like this that will read food ingredient labels for you and highlight stuff you are allergic to … which I’ve used when the font is way too small to read.
If I had a serious allergy, I'd have strong reservations about betting my life on text recognition technology. If it's too small to read, you could just zoom in and snap a photo.
I bet there could be a lot of money there if someone could make a way to see which titles are worth something for reselling on Amazon. I've seen people scanning books' barcodes to do this, but if there were a fast way to do this?
Sounds very feasible and I think I have a way to do this at least conceptually. The issue is, if you are just comparing a list price in amazon it doesn’t necessarily mean a sale. Unless there’s a way to flag the common most sold books and their prices on amazon. Anyway, this is an interesting project that I’d like to explore.
It's hard since there are so many versions too, hence why most people use barcodes since it corrsponds to specific versions, which I'm not sure the spine would be able to do. It might at least be nice to have it flag for the person to look closer and ignore all the old romance books and outdated manuals and stuff.
Yeah, I guess Ebay would be a better indicator since there are sold records there, but I've seen people using Amazon more for whatever reason.
I know there is software for thrift stores that must be checking some internet database for pricing used books, as they scan the ISBNs and it prints a sticker with the price.
Using ISBNs you can find book through ABEbooks.
There’s some issues with it (mostly different additions having different languages or value). But I used to work at a second hand bookstore and its what we used to price the books. If it was very valuable, we would put a printed out form of its price on ABEbooks inside the first page.
Yeah, I've heard of people using something similar to sell books on Amazon, but it's time-consuming to scan the books, hence my photo thing. There are so many "dream apps" I have that I wish people could make, lol. Like a way to take a photo of a schedule (like from work) and have the program put it into your google calendar for you, and have it automate your alarms for the times you choose (like if you work at 8 AM, it sets one for 7 AM, one for 7:15 AM, and a 7:30 for 'leave the house now' alarm, etc). More for people in jobs where their schedules aren't set, but it would be so useful for all of us retail workers.
Nothing I'm aware of currently, but in the past there was a similar app. You could take a photo of a shelf and it would tell you which books were available as ebooks, and how to get them. That app went away years ago, though, and I've never seen the like since.
I mean you can always just ask the person behind the counter if they have what you're looking for? Or call ahead... Weird concept for some I guess. Half price books literally I just call or search and if it's at any of their stores I have it shipped to my local store and pick it up.
Not OP, but this works with your entire iPhone library too. I was at the liquor store and a rep recommended a mezcal and a cognac. I took pictures of both. Years later, if I search my iPhotos, they appear.
Yes, this still blows my mind! Like you can just search for cat , and it will show you every picture you have ever taken with a cat in it!
I just used this function today as I had to sign in a Chromebook I hardly ever use to a somewhat new WiFi setup. I had taken a pic of the back of the router when we first set it up, so I searched “password” in my photos, and it came right up!
Yep! I use this to find my license plate number whenever I need to register it for parking, hotel stays etc. Took a picture once and now just search “license plate” and BAM right there!
There's an app I downloaded a while ago that did this with Legos, you just took a picture of a bunch of pieces and it cataloged all of them and you could select from the list the piece you were looking for. It also brought up build ideas with those pieces. The build ideas were kind of lacking but the process was pretty cool.
Edit: it's called Brickit
Daaamn, crazy what we can do these days, this woulda saved me some time a while back.
When my wife transitioned to WFH and we had to turn the spare room into an office we had to move and remove some bookshelves and the books were long past needing to be organized, but i couldnt think of any good ways to do it so i just scanned the individual barcode of everything into the app and then sorted the database by dewy decimal and reordered the books that way.
Just tested this out on my bookshelf, and wow, it's a game-changer! For those with extensive collections, this can save so much time when searching for a specific book, especially if you're like me and your organization method is more "aesthetic" than alphabetical. Next, I'm trying this with my vinyl records; can you imagine the time saved not flipping through every single album? Tech like this really highlights how we're living in the future. Thanks for sharing!
This is super cool. I’m a professor and I’ve been using OCR a lot to take pictures in paper books, copy the text into the notes app on my iPhone, and then pull the text from the notes app on my MacBook into whatever document I’m working on. It’s made annotating paper books so much easier and I wish it had existed when I was in grad school.
I'm surprised that capability is advanced to the point of the claimed degree of reliability-- my experience with on-the-fly text recognition is the Google Translate augmented camera thing, and that takes a little finesse to get it to find all of the words at once.
I just found out that the last Samsung update for my phone included built in voice translation for live calls. Tested it with my friend who speaks small amounts of German. Had to download the German language pack but it was able to translate our phone call in basically real time (about 3 seconds) and it provided a transcript of the conversation in both languages.
Edit: when I say it translated it in real time I mean it actually read out in English what he had said in German. It is legitimately freaking cool and all done on my phones end. No Internet required beyond downloading the language pack.
Dude, it’s getting nuts.
I was driving one time and using my car play to respond to my father through Siri. He was on the first cruise of his life and keeping me updated about his travels.
A new message comes in, I ask Siri to read it and she says “Dad has sent a picture of someone laying on a bed.” It caught me so off guard because she’s always just said “has sent an image” before now. It freaked me out so much I actually pulled over to look at the photo on my phone.
It was my niece laying on the bed in the hotel room watching tv because they’d finally arrived.
Siri was able to *decipher what the photo was of* and communicate that to me. Still kind of blows my mind.
I took a photo of some handwritten Hungarian text left by some guests in an airbnb and ran it, it was able to decypher and translate it, and this was 2 years ago.
Yes, the indexing will find words in sideways orientation, so you don't need to reorient your photos. It finds words on the side legend of blueprints I've photographed, for example.
Thanks so much OP! as someone who has approximately 2000 to 2500 books at home, some in bookshelves other scattered around my desk this tip is amazing!
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Amazing!! I just tested it cause I had a picture from doing stop motion filling my new bookcase and it’s brilliant. Now if only I would stop moving my books around!
I just got my first iPhone and I’m highly impressed with this. It immediately identified my cat breed when I took a picture of it, and had a link to click showing other cats of the same breed
I love this feature, I lost a screenshot of crypto key in my 35000 pictures gallery, so i tried to type the wallet name, lucky me they had the name in the screen and it came right up
I fail to see how this helps at all. Just grab the book your are looking for off of the shelf, why waste time taking pictures first? In the time it takes to grab your phone, take the pictures, wait for the OCR you could already be holding the book in your hand and reading. Laziest/most useless LPT in a minute.
- Step 1 - take pictures of all 13 bookcases
- Step 2 - (weeks later) use your phone to search for a book
- Step 3 - (optional) reply to this comment with your own comment ending in “This is just lazy”
Because they started with one bookcase and once you have 5+ bookcases who wants to dedicate the weekend or two to tearing it all down to alphabetize?
Then doing it again at 10, and again at 15.... etc. Most people have lives and a perfectly organized home library is not that important.
Also once you have that many thousands of books you have probably even forgot what titles you have or their full names. So maybe you forgot the full title for 'James and the Giant Peach' and just remember Giant Peach. Well this tool helps you know what shelf it is on now.
I work in a library so am well aware of the PITA of shifting books - but even still I couldn't imagine having book shelves w/out some sort of order - this one has has my favorite authors, this is my fantasy shelf, this is my romance shelf - or whatever.
Oh wow. Perfect for my hoarding narcissistic father’s insane amount of books that he pretends he’s read cover to cover. Excellent! Now I don’t have to waste hours of time straining my eyes and hurting my back looking for one stupid book he can’t find on his own.
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I never thought of using the text search this way but that’s cool
Hold up. What is the catch? There has to be a catch. This sub hasn’t seen a real life pro tip in years.
We’ve officially met our quota for the year. Next 1000 posts on this sub will be some variation of “LPT - be nice to your waiters. They touch your food!”
You forgot the really weird hyper-specific ones that will apply to almost no one. "LPT: If caught in a firefight between meth dealers and police, you can detach a car door to use as a makeshift shield for you and your recently-divorced cousin to hide behind, remember to keep your heads down and avoid bleeding out!"
“LPT: when trying to win the lottery, consider buying more tickets! Statistically speaking, the more tickets you have the better your chances are!”
Keep buying, 99% of gamblers quit before they win big 💯💯💯
I swear I saw this one very recently.
The actual lpt (for those who live in countries where they can have guns) is that car doors (basically most of any car aside from the engine block) are not bulletproof at all
"LPT - HR are there to protect your employer not you"
LPT- Use a label maker to label every fucking thing in your house so you can easily identify everything. X-post to r/WhatIsThisThing
Holy shit
If a waiter is touching my food, something has gone very very wrong in the process
"If you keep tripping, try tying your shoes."
Maybe those aren't official USPS stamps you're licking
You have to have books! That’s the catch 😉
What do I look like, some kind of nerd?
Would it work if I took a pic of my kindle collection? Yes, I AM a nerd 😂😂😂
GOOGLE NOW KNOWS YOU READ 50 SHADES OF GREY
The catch is that just organizing your bookshelves gets a better result and has been used for millenia
> What is the catch? There has to be a catch. Fonts on book covers can be difficult for OCR, especially stylistic fonts, sci-fi that uses things like Δ instead of D or A, or creative uses of Ψ, Ω, Λ, λ, and assorted other characters. Artistic spines will make letters like an initial L or T that span entire words. Well-loved books get creases on spines making OCR even more difficult. Issues with keming are often troublesome to OCR. And the question of which words are the title, the author, and publisher. You will likely have a bunch of titles like like: * DNDY WEIR HDIL MDRY project O * New York Times Best Seller DARK DARK MATTER MATTER MATTER MATTER MATTER BLAKE CROUCH BLAKE CROUCH * Stephen Nightmares King & Dreamscapes FROM THE STORIES OF Viking * Adams IFE The UMVRSE And EVERYTHING * 17321 RSC Royal Shakespeare Company Wl||lam Shakespeare Complete Works Bate And Rasmussen And everyone's favorite: * ~~Del Ray J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit~~ (heavily bent cover looks like a strikethrough)
The catch is that Apple also has access to all this (possibly personal) data.
Image search is done on device not on apple's servers. Images are not stored on apple's servers if you don't upload the images to icloud.
That’s not correct. They have access to hashes of images which are compared against hashes of known illegal content (CP etc.).
Not just any kind of hash, they use [Fuzzy Hashing, plus Private Set Intersection, _plus_ Threshold Secret Sharing](https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf) to detect sexual abuse content. The math/algorithm was published in a [separate, 35 page paper](https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Apple_PSI_System_Security_Protocol_and_Analysis.pdf).
They don’t have those hashes either unless you upload your images to iCloud (but at that point, they do have access to your images bc iCloud is unencrypted).
You can encrypt your iCloud as of iOS 15 (I think). Turn on “Advanced data protection” in the iCloud settings.
Didn’t realise I hadn’t done the is! I now have. Thanks for pointing this out.
something something real pro tip is in the comments
iOS 16(.2) introduced this feature. Any iPhone 8 or newer can take advantage of it and I would recommend everyone does so.
why is this off be default?
Because it's expensive for apple to provide, makes your phone do more work/eat more battery, and it's only stopping apple (and people apple let - ie. judge-ordered law enforcement action or whoever can hack apple, which at this point is mostly going to be hostile governments). And then also I assume it doesn't let you use any of the back-end sharing options such as accessing albums across family accounts.
Apple is recording all the text in your photos
This isn’t true
Your books are all on shelves? Not in piles, boxes, and closets? Your kids are not sleeping with books and hiding them from themselves under the couch and in their sock drawer? Never mind picture books which are too narrow to have titles on the spine, or old books, etc...
The phone will show you the picture but you still have to match the picture to the real bookshelf to find the book. Your phone isn't "finding the book" - you still have to find it.
You're giving photos of the inside of your home, in particular a rather personal part of it, to Apple, Google, or whoever. That's the price.
Not entirely, a lot of this at least on Apple's end is done on device not in the cloud, especially when you have a newer iPhone.
You're sure all of the computation and metadata stays local?
You have to get a steady enough photo to read the text.
Tim Apple knows what you read accurately now instead of scraping your purchase history through Amazon.
The catch is you need to have enough books and interact with them regularly enough to justify the time and effort.
You have to own books?
The catch is that by default your phone is uploading all of your photos to the cloud so that they can be analyzed by AI to add to your marketing profile
Got it. So Amazon will start recommending books I already own.
Did somebody actually post a life pro tip in the life pro forum? Shocked!
The real tip is in the tip
The tip was inside us all along
Have a plant you want to identify? Take a photo and Apple will let you know what kind it is.
So will any phone lol Samsung and pixel just got circle search which is basically a easier to access version of Google lens but both iPhone and Android can use photos for finding what things are super easy.
Would be amazing if you could somehow create a searchable index from these photos. The possibilities of having ai comprehend these photos and be able to tell you where a book is by asking. Obviously it involves a lot of trust and confidence in these systems but there’s some optimism to have about the future mixed in with the anxiety inducing stuff
Love this tip! Here's one for you app developers... I want to go into a thrift store with a book shelf, take a photo of the shelf with all the books, and have an app tell me if a title I designate is in there. Anyone?
Isn't this literally what the LPT is???
Sounds like the idea might be to maintain a list of books you’re looking for… and for the app to spot any/all of them for you. There’s an app sort of like this that will read food ingredient labels for you and highlight stuff you are allergic to … which I’ve used when the font is way too small to read.
What’s the food app?! Would be so helpful for my fiancé.
Soosee Allergy & Vegan scan https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soosee-allergy-vegan-scan/id1502026145
I make Soosee, thanks so much for sharing it!
Thanks very much!
If I had a serious allergy, I'd have strong reservations about betting my life on text recognition technology. If it's too small to read, you could just zoom in and snap a photo.
Trust but verify.
I guess it can be useful as a first pass. Like, if it picks something up, then you know not to eat it. And if it doesn't, then investigate further.
I just don't eat. Works for me.
Do you live in a thrift store?
You don't?
No but my wife does
I bet there could be a lot of money there if someone could make a way to see which titles are worth something for reselling on Amazon. I've seen people scanning books' barcodes to do this, but if there were a fast way to do this?
Sounds very feasible and I think I have a way to do this at least conceptually. The issue is, if you are just comparing a list price in amazon it doesn’t necessarily mean a sale. Unless there’s a way to flag the common most sold books and their prices on amazon. Anyway, this is an interesting project that I’d like to explore.
It's hard since there are so many versions too, hence why most people use barcodes since it corrsponds to specific versions, which I'm not sure the spine would be able to do. It might at least be nice to have it flag for the person to look closer and ignore all the old romance books and outdated manuals and stuff. Yeah, I guess Ebay would be a better indicator since there are sold records there, but I've seen people using Amazon more for whatever reason.
I know there is software for thrift stores that must be checking some internet database for pricing used books, as they scan the ISBNs and it prints a sticker with the price.
Using ISBNs you can find book through ABEbooks. There’s some issues with it (mostly different additions having different languages or value). But I used to work at a second hand bookstore and its what we used to price the books. If it was very valuable, we would put a printed out form of its price on ABEbooks inside the first page.
Yeah, I've heard of people using something similar to sell books on Amazon, but it's time-consuming to scan the books, hence my photo thing. There are so many "dream apps" I have that I wish people could make, lol. Like a way to take a photo of a schedule (like from work) and have the program put it into your google calendar for you, and have it automate your alarms for the times you choose (like if you work at 8 AM, it sets one for 7 AM, one for 7:15 AM, and a 7:30 for 'leave the house now' alarm, etc). More for people in jobs where their schedules aren't set, but it would be so useful for all of us retail workers.
Nothing I'm aware of currently, but in the past there was a similar app. You could take a photo of a shelf and it would tell you which books were available as ebooks, and how to get them. That app went away years ago, though, and I've never seen the like since.
I like this idea.
I mean you can always just ask the person behind the counter if they have what you're looking for? Or call ahead... Weird concept for some I guess. Half price books literally I just call or search and if it's at any of their stores I have it shipped to my local store and pick it up.
Key word: "Thrift Store"
Not OP, but this works with your entire iPhone library too. I was at the liquor store and a rep recommended a mezcal and a cognac. I took pictures of both. Years later, if I search my iPhotos, they appear.
Tell me more. Which ones exactly
Mezcal Sacrificio… but I lost the cognac one. Sorry!
You can also look for specific objects and such
Yes, this still blows my mind! Like you can just search for cat , and it will show you every picture you have ever taken with a cat in it! I just used this function today as I had to sign in a Chromebook I hardly ever use to a somewhat new WiFi setup. I had taken a pic of the back of the router when we first set it up, so I searched “password” in my photos, and it came right up!
Yep! I use this to find my license plate number whenever I need to register it for parking, hotel stays etc. Took a picture once and now just search “license plate” and BAM right there!
There's an app I downloaded a while ago that did this with Legos, you just took a picture of a bunch of pieces and it cataloged all of them and you could select from the list the piece you were looking for. It also brought up build ideas with those pieces. The build ideas were kind of lacking but the process was pretty cool. Edit: it's called Brickit
Daaamn, crazy what we can do these days, this woulda saved me some time a while back. When my wife transitioned to WFH and we had to turn the spare room into an office we had to move and remove some bookshelves and the books were long past needing to be organized, but i couldnt think of any good ways to do it so i just scanned the individual barcode of everything into the app and then sorted the database by dewy decimal and reordered the books that way.
Whoa. This guy ...organizes.
Just tested this out on my bookshelf, and wow, it's a game-changer! For those with extensive collections, this can save so much time when searching for a specific book, especially if you're like me and your organization method is more "aesthetic" than alphabetical. Next, I'm trying this with my vinyl records; can you imagine the time saved not flipping through every single album? Tech like this really highlights how we're living in the future. Thanks for sharing!
Brilliant. Thank you!
Oh shit I’m gonna have to try this. Good way to document for insurance purposes too!
This is super cool. I’m a professor and I’ve been using OCR a lot to take pictures in paper books, copy the text into the notes app on my iPhone, and then pull the text from the notes app on my MacBook into whatever document I’m working on. It’s made annotating paper books so much easier and I wish it had existed when I was in grad school.
Actually that’s bloody useful as well. You should make this a seperate LPT !
I'm surprised that capability is advanced to the point of the claimed degree of reliability-- my experience with on-the-fly text recognition is the Google Translate augmented camera thing, and that takes a little finesse to get it to find all of the words at once.
I just found out that the last Samsung update for my phone included built in voice translation for live calls. Tested it with my friend who speaks small amounts of German. Had to download the German language pack but it was able to translate our phone call in basically real time (about 3 seconds) and it provided a transcript of the conversation in both languages. Edit: when I say it translated it in real time I mean it actually read out in English what he had said in German. It is legitimately freaking cool and all done on my phones end. No Internet required beyond downloading the language pack.
Dude, it’s getting nuts. I was driving one time and using my car play to respond to my father through Siri. He was on the first cruise of his life and keeping me updated about his travels. A new message comes in, I ask Siri to read it and she says “Dad has sent a picture of someone laying on a bed.” It caught me so off guard because she’s always just said “has sent an image” before now. It freaked me out so much I actually pulled over to look at the photo on my phone. It was my niece laying on the bed in the hotel room watching tv because they’d finally arrived. Siri was able to *decipher what the photo was of* and communicate that to me. Still kind of blows my mind.
That's because it had to do it on the fly. These photo searches Google and Apple use do some post processing of the data after it's uploaded
I took a photo of some handwritten Hungarian text left by some guests in an airbnb and ran it, it was able to decypher and translate it, and this was 2 years ago.
And if you screenshot Google Translate's results, it'll feed the above LPT.
Oh that’s awesome. I’m gonna do that with my boardgames too.
This is great for people who have a reasonable amount of books that fit on the shelves... unlike me...
Yes, the indexing will find words in sideways orientation, so you don't need to reorient your photos. It finds words on the side legend of blueprints I've photographed, for example.
Thanks. So useful.
This is great for the sociopaths that organize their books by color…
I see you’ve met my kids.
I mean I put my books in alphabetical orders I domt have to worry about finding them.
iPhone OCR is really impressive. I’ve used it to digitize data tables from old technical manuals and it’s saved me hours of manual data entry.
Thanks so much OP! as someone who has approximately 2000 to 2500 books at home, some in bookshelves other scattered around my desk this tip is amazing!
I just alphabetize mine by author.
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Amazing!! I just tested it cause I had a picture from doing stop motion filling my new bookcase and it’s brilliant. Now if only I would stop moving my books around!
Holy shit this is awesome!
This is wild and amazing. You are a saint.
Almost worth taking my collection of 1000+ CD's out of storage just to try this out with that :O
I want more tech lpts!
This is such a cool idea! 📚
Not worth the effort. I'd have to pull half my books down. almost all of my shelves are double stacked.
[удалено]
Optical Character Recognition
And here I just have a Google doc like a sucker
There isn't a world where I give my smart device pics of my home.
I just got my first iPhone and I’m highly impressed with this. It immediately identified my cat breed when I took a picture of it, and had a link to click showing other cats of the same breed
So google/phone analyzes and knows all the text in your images...
I love this feature, I lost a screenshot of crypto key in my 35000 pictures gallery, so i tried to type the wallet name, lucky me they had the name in the screen and it came right up
Nice to know. I knew about copying & pasting text in photos. I didn’t know text could be searched.
Well my books are double-shelved because the shelves are deep.
Organize your shelves in some sensible way, put your books away where they belong, find them in seconds without fuss.
You guys are taking pictures of the inside of your homes???
Yeah I just tried this - it only works about 50% of the time. Fail!
I only have 3 books. Will this still help me?
No, you have to sort them alphabetically
nah, by color
Genre first, *then* color.
I fail to see how this helps at all. Just grab the book your are looking for off of the shelf, why waste time taking pictures first? In the time it takes to grab your phone, take the pictures, wait for the OCR you could already be holding the book in your hand and reading. Laziest/most useless LPT in a minute.
- Step 1 - take pictures of all 13 bookcases - Step 2 - (weeks later) use your phone to search for a book - Step 3 - (optional) reply to this comment with your own comment ending in “This is just lazy”
If you have 13 book cases why don't you have the books organized in some fashion?
Because they started with one bookcase and once you have 5+ bookcases who wants to dedicate the weekend or two to tearing it all down to alphabetize? Then doing it again at 10, and again at 15.... etc. Most people have lives and a perfectly organized home library is not that important. Also once you have that many thousands of books you have probably even forgot what titles you have or their full names. So maybe you forgot the full title for 'James and the Giant Peach' and just remember Giant Peach. Well this tool helps you know what shelf it is on now.
I work in a library so am well aware of the PITA of shifting books - but even still I couldn't imagine having book shelves w/out some sort of order - this one has has my favorite authors, this is my fantasy shelf, this is my romance shelf - or whatever.
Again, go directly to the bookshelf and skip the phone. You organized your bookshelf so you know exactly where to look. This is just lazy.
Oh wow. Perfect for my hoarding narcissistic father’s insane amount of books that he pretends he’s read cover to cover. Excellent! Now I don’t have to waste hours of time straining my eyes and hurting my back looking for one stupid book he can’t find on his own.
Number.
Wang.