How does Dropbox OCR work?

[ToledoTom]

New to Dropbox ...

I understand that Dropbox can perform OCR on my pdf (and other) files?

Do I need to do something to make this happen?

My workflow involves scanning paper directly to my Dropbox folder; which then syncs to my NAS (the NAS has Dropbox integration in its OS.)  Or, scan and save to the NAS, which then syncs to Dropbox.

In either of these scenarios (preferably both), will Dropbox automatically perform OCR so that the document is searchable on both the NAS and in the Dropbox cloud?  If so, how do I make that happen?

[Walter · Accepted solution]

Hey @ToledoTom, thanks for using Dropbox and happy Monday!

I'm not entirely sure about your scenarios, but you should be able to use the doc scanning feature to achieve what you had in mind. 
 

Also, keep in mind that the automatic image text recognition (or OCR for short) can scan the following file types:

1. JPGs, GIFs, PNGs, and TIFFs that are a picture of a document (eg: a receipt).
2. PDFs that don’t have text metadata (eg: documents created by a scanner or fax machine).

I hope this helps to some extent.