Search for Typed Text With IPhone Camera Using SearchCam
iOS: Have you ever read a paper book and would like to hit ctrl-F? Use the free SearchCam iOS app to search typed text using your phone camera. Works with documents, books, packaging and even posters.
The app is not sleek, but fast, works in real time or with static photos. Either way, enter a few letters and SearchCam will highlight wherever they appear.
Live search isn’t ideal, especially if you’re looking for a curved page of an open book. When we tested it, SearchCam sometimes lost and found a word if it was in the shadow or twisted near the spine of the book. But the natural shake of our hand was enough for the app to “shake everything back into place,” catching every word we searched for.
The great thing about real-time search is that you can flip through the book, scrolling through each page for a word. So if you know the word appears somewhere in the chapter, you can quickly scan the entire chapter without saving thirty photographs of the pages to your camera roll. But if you are tired of holding your phone in your hands, SearchCam works with saved images too.
The app can detect part of a word — you can search for “by” and see where it appears in longer words such as “perimeter” or “point” —but it cannot search for a multi-word phrase. And you can only scan one search term at a time.
SearchCam charges $ 3 to remove ads, but when we tested the free version, we didn’t see any ads.
For Android users who want to search in real documents, try Find and press Ctrl F. (The CTRL-F app of the same name that we reviewed in 2016 has disappeared from the Google Play store.)