Preferred languages can be set in Language & Region System Preferences on Mac, or General Settings on your iOS device.
On macOS 11.0 or iOS 14 and later, if the primary text recognition language is English, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, German or Spanish, Keep It will also include any of your preferred languages from that list. This can be changed to another language, or a script that encompasses many related languages (e.g.
By default, Keep It uses the same language as your Mac or iOS device. Text recognition relies on knowing which language it needs to recognize. There is no way to see the recognized text in the app, but it will be indexed so that it can be searched.
Handwriting is unlikely to produce usable results.
Keep It will perform text recognition if necessary on attachments to notes, RTFD files, and mail messages. Screenshots may produce good results where larger fonts are used, or the screenshot was taken from a higher resolution screen, such as a Retina display. OCR works best with higher resolution images such as photos, and for text where there is a high contrast between foreground and background colors. Text recognition for images may not be as accurate on macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 as on Mojave and iOS 12 or later, due to advancements in Apple’s computer vision technology. Keep It will take steps to refine the quality of the text, but only text where there is a high contrast between foreground and background colors is likely to yield good results.Īs with PDFs, image files are not modified, but rather the text is indexed so that it can be searched, and stored in iCloud (if in use) to avoid duplication of work across devices. Imagesįor images, Keep It uses computer vision to detect areas of text in the image, and only performs text recognition on any areas found. On iOS, tap the status bar below either of the lists. To see progress on Mac, choose Window > Activity from the menu and check whether Keep It is performing any “Extracting info” operations. Keep It always performs text recognition in the background (and on Mac, in a completely separate process). While it might take a few seconds to recognize the text on a single page, larger and more complex documents could take a few minutes.
Larger PDF documents and those with more complex layouts may take some time. This data will take up minimal space, typically between 1 and 2 kilobytes per page. The text is also stored in iCloud, if in use, to avoid repeating that work on other devices. Instead, the text stored in the document will be indexed so that it can be searched.Īfter performing text recognition, Keep It does not modify PDF documents to add an invisible text layer, but instead indexes that text so it can be searched. PDF Documentsįor PDFs, Keep It will not perform text recognition if there is indexable text in the document already. Text recognition may take some time - see below for more details.
On iOS, Keep It will temporarily download items to perform text recognition on them, while the app is connected to Wi-Fi (unless the "Use Mobile Data for Indexing" setting is enabled). Keep It has always been able to index the text in PDFs that have selectable text or had OCR performed on them already, and does not perform unnecessary text recognition on those, or on images that do not appear to contain any text. Keep It doesn’t modify PDFs or convert images to make them searchable, but rather indexes the text so that it can be found again, and stores that text in iCloud to save repeating the work on other devices. Keep It will perform text recognition on PDF documents and images, (including attachments, as of v1.7), using computer vision and machine learning technologies to minimize work and produce the most accurate results.