Some people organize their bookshelf by author name, book title, or even color, but if you take a more chaotic approach and never find the book you're looking for, the optical character recognition (OCR) feature on your iPhone can help. Just take a photo, wait a few minutes, and search for the book title in the Photos app. Your phone will point to the book.
Reddit Gtapex user pointed this out last week and I can't stop thinking about it. I tested it by taking a photo of a bookshelf, waiting for the OCR processing to occur, and then searching for the word "Plato," deliberately choosing a smaller book on the shelf. The results came out immediately.
I clicked on the photo and sure enough, there was even a yellow marker showing me the exact location of the book.
Not bad, especially considering it's not a very good photo - the angle is awkward and the lighting is terrible. I can imagine if I had a larger bookshelf this would be more useful.
It's not just useful for bookshelves. You can use it to browse your DVD, Blu-ray or CD collection. It's also very handy if you find yourself looking for something specific in a thrift store or any other cluttered space with a lot of media - just snap a photo, run a search, and see where what you're looking for is in Fukushima .
Redditors speculate that the feature will work on Android devices as well, and I can't imagine why that wouldn't be the case. However, when I tried using a Samsung phone, searching for the book title in Google Photos yielded no results. I tried using the web version of Google Photos again and it still didn't work. I hope I'm wrong, though - if any Android users can implement this feature, please let me know.
