You Can Use Your IPhone to Find a Specific Book on the Shelves
Some people organize their bookshelves by author, book title, or even color, but if you take a more chaotic approach and can never find the book you’re looking for, the iPhone’s optical character recognition (OCR) feature can help you out. Just take a photo, wait a few minutes, and search for the book’s title in the Photos app. Your phone will point to the book.
Reddit user Gtapex pointed this out last week and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I tested this by taking a photo of my bookshelf, waiting a minute for OCR processing to occur, and searching for the word “Plato” by deliberately selecting one of the physically smaller books on the shelf. The result appeared immediately.
I tapped the photo and sure enough, there was even a yellow marker showing exactly where the book was.
Not bad, especially considering that it was not a very good photo – the angle was awkward, the lighting was bad. I could imagine this would be even more useful if I had a much larger bookshelf.
And it’s useful for more than just bookshelves. You can use this to watch your DVD, Blu-Ray or CD collection. This can also be very useful if you ever find yourself looking for something specific at a thrift store or any other chaotic place with a lot of media – just take a photo, run a search and see where the thing you’re looking for is . because there is.
A Redditor suggested that this feature might also work on an Android device, and I can’t think of why it wouldn’t. However, when I tried using both Samsung phones, searching for book titles in Google Photos yielded no results. I tried using the web version of Google Photos again, but it still didn’t help. However, I’d like to be wrong: if any Android users get this working, please let me know.