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Project Naptha
- conorcleary 4y agoSubmitters need to get back to more descriptive titles on HN. If this post is the first and only exposure to this project for a user, "Project Naptha" alone doesn't give me confidence to roll the dice and click on an unknown link unless there are existing comments I can investigate. Thus, chicken and egg, scroll by.
- cyberbanjo 4y agoBrowser extension OCR: From the homepage "Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image. "
- latchkey 4y agoTrue, that said, it made it to the front page... and while not everything on the front page is super interesting, it does give it a bit weight on the dice roll fun.
- 1123581321 4y agoI never heard of it and I clicked because the name intrigued me. You might benefit from a link preview extension to reduce the friction to explore links before comments.
- lmm 4y agoThey probably put a descriptive title and then had a mod edit it to use the non-descriptive page title instead, as per HN's usual policy and practice.
- em-bee 4y agoi don't think that happened. in my understanding that rule applies to article titles, not to site titles. in my opinion, when posting a site, then a description, ideally taken from the site, should be included. this is kind of a variation of a "show HN", like "look what i found"
- jessmartin 4y agoAdding the "subtitle" from the site itself would provide at least a bit of helpful context: "highlight, copy, and translate text from any image."
- keyle 4y agoInteresting but I thought my mac already does this? Maybe just M1 and Monterey. I was trying to debug some image the other day, upon inspection I got confused by the shadow dom doing weird stuff, but only in safari; to then realise that it was macOS converting the text in the image to text in shadow dom! ... Good/bad experience report I suppose. ref. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/preview/prvw625a5b2c/mac https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/preview/prvw625a5b2c/m...
- brian_herman 4y agoYes I think you can do it in preview too.
- kbouck 4y ago... and on iphone/ipad https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212630 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212630
- modeless 4y agoAndroid does this too, though you have to go into the app switcher for it to work. Super useful.
- oittaa 4y agoIt would be great if Google allowed that everywhere. Does anyone know if it's on the roadmap?
- modeless 4y agoI think the extra step of going into the app switcher is not really an issue. It works for every app, and I actually like that I know whether I'm using the OCR or traditional copy/paste because OCR isn't perfect. When I copy from the app switcher I know I need to double check the results after pasting. If it just did OCR automatically all the time I'd probably be surprised after copying some text and realizing later that there was an OCR mistake in the result because I didn't realize that OCR had been used.
- LegitShady 4y agothe front page still contains references to google+
- holler 4y agoReally cool! I went to try the translate feature but each time I left-click to open the nav menu (macOs) it deselects the text? I know it says right-click but for me it's left-click to open the menu.
- tim-- 4y agoI had this extension on my Chrome browser a few years ago, and was dumbfounded when I thought that Chrome had added the ability to not only OCR PNG files - but also replace the text in them! Completely forgot that I installed this extension years earlier. Crazy extension!
- moneywoes 4y agoWhat's the catch?
- solardev 4y agoToday it's replacing the text in PNGs. Tomorrow it's replacing us. Duh duh duh...
- shubhamjain 4y agoThis makes me feel old. I saw it for the first time in 2014 on HN, just when it was announced. I felt kind of envious of Kevin Kwok, author of this project. I had just graduated and he was still an undergrad. He had already shipped so many complex projects, including a full-fledged Flash Animator[1] for the web. It's pretty surprising to see that his site hasn't been updated since 2015 and not many projects have been shipped since then. [1]: https://antimatter15.com/project/ajax-animator/ https://antimatter15.com/project/ajax-animator/
- zxexz 4y agoAhh, I did an Algolia search just now and found the 2019 post[0] but thought that felt a bit recent for what I remember. I can't find that 2014 post, however - do you have a link? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919147
- shubhamjain 4y agoHere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7629396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7629396
- gfd 4y agoi remember the last time i saw his name was on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14894653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14894653 (which i guess lost against tensorflow.js?) in around 2017 or so.
- me_again 4y agoWhat I would really like is a little bit like this but not quite the same: full text search over everything I have ever seen on the computer. It would read and index the emails, web pages, word docs, etc as I open them, then later when I think "I know I saw a doc about cache oblivious algorithms", I can search for it without being distracted by 100K documents I haven't seen. Or I can find that email I read, without finding the same phrase in a bunch of junk mail I never opened. Does anything remotely similar exist?
- rhn_mk1 4y agoFor the web part, there's a tool called Recoll, and a browser plugin Recoll-we.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- solardev 4y agoI think windows and Mac both do this by default, no? Just disable the web search and your local full text is what you're left with.
- The5thElephant 4y agoI believe they meant they want something that searches only content the user has personally directly accessed, not ALL local content.
- invalidusernam3 4y agoOrdering by "Date Last Opened" or "Date Modified" does a fairly good job in some cases
- theK 4y agoThis does introduce sorting contention though, what to sort for first? relevance or date accessed? Ideally you would want to introduce date accessed as an aspect of relevance itself.
- metadat 4y agoDoes Naptha still work? I recently reviewed all installed chrome extensions and it seemed broken, so I removed it.
- jordemort 4y agoThis needs a year annotation - I almost emailed to express interest in a Firefox version until I noticed the references to Chrome 36 and Google+
- crorella 4y agohehe, I was thinking the same, then I read your comment. I wish they give support to Firefox in the future, getting text (and even modifying it!) is something I need to do often.
- input_sh 4y agoOpening via Firefox shows me this: > Depending on the number of sign-ups, a Firefox version may be released in a few weeks. If you're interested in Naptha for other browsers, email me. So they're at the very least considering it. EDIT: Never mind, it says so since 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140425003753/https://projectnaptha.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140425003753/https://projectna...
- eastendguy 4y agoCopyfish is a good alternative to Project Naptha and works in Firefox: https://ocr.space/copyfish https://ocr.space/copyfish
- Ajedi32 4y agoYeah, I wonder if there's a more modern version of this somewhere. On-device OCR is probably good enough now that a fully-offline-by-default version of this might make sense, and that's something I might actually use.
- wanderlust2021 4y agoCopyfish uses offline OCr.
- nit987 4y agoHey, loved it. How much time it took to develop this?
- _tom_ 4y agoNice! This works slightly better than apple's version, which makes it very hard to select the main image, once it detects text in the image. Naphtha seems to handle this correctly!
- adastra22 4y ago> Unfortunately, your browser is not yet supported Safari on macOS.
- terramex 4y agoSafari has its own, built-in implementation of that called Live Text since last year. Just try highlighting any text in the image and voila - it works. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/preview/prvw625a5b2c/mac https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/preview/prvw625a5b2c/m...
- WesternWind 4y agoSame with Firefox on MacOS here.
- irae 4y agoVery interesting that Firefox would have this level of integration with the OS. Firefox of old was criticized specifically for being completelly not native to macOS. Times change. I might give Firefox a shot in the recent future.
- adastra22 4y agoI don’t think he is saying it is working?
- WesternWind 4y agoSorry yes, it doesn't work. It only works on Chrome afaik.
- chrisseaton 4y agoIronic, because Safari already does this natively.
- zxexz 4y agoI thought this seemed familiar. Discussed on HN 3 years ago [0] I remember using this for a while on a separate Chrome profile. It was quite useful, albeit quite CPU intensive. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919147
- draugadrotten 4y agoThis extension is a privacy nightmare. "By default, when you begin selecting text, it sends a secure HTTPS request containing the URL of the specific image... The server responds with a list of existing translations and OCR languages that have been done." That is some pretty sensitive data to keep around. There seems to be some rudimentary thinking around privacy: "no user tokens, no website information, no cookies or analytics" Yet keeping an index of all the image requests from any IP would not pass muster by any GDPR lawyer I have met. http://my-support-group/advice-for-disease.jpg http://my-support-group/advice-for-disease.jpg http://my-political-group/campaign-ideas.jpg http://my-political-group/campaign-ideas.jpg http://my-therapy-group/suicide-prevention.jpg http://my-therapy-group/suicide-prevention.jpg https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/legal-grounds-processing-data/sensitive-data/what-personal-data-considered-sensitive_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
- nprateem 4y agoThere are probably some hacking angles too, e.g. I wonder if the API will helpfully tell me the contents of https://mybank.com/user/latest-statement.jpg https://mybank.com/user/latest-statement.jpg or whatever
- emmelaich 4y agoFWIW, there is a Chrome app for cloud vision, OCR. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmokgbialjjgfhfofbgfcghhbkejac https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmo... By a Google employee I understand but not official Google product of course.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mcintyre1994 4y agoI love this idea, Apple recently added it for saved photos on iOS and I think in preview too? It doesn't seem to be working for me though. I highlighted some text, hit ctrl + c and got this in my clipboard: <[ TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS / MORE INFO: http://projectnaptha.com/process/ http://projectnaptha.com/process/ (IDX:a:0-a:1-a:2-b:7&a:0&a:0&168&817:XDI) / ELAPSED 26.11SEC / DATE Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:08:50 GMT / TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS ]> The right-click translate doesn't seem to work either, it just selects a whole paragraph.
- lancesells 4y agoIt works on all images in Safari on macOS as well. It's actually been helpful but was very odd when all of a sudden the functionality appeared out of the blue.
- irae 4y agoEven though I watch WWDC every year and the iPhone release event, I was surprised with how it works, and how fast it is. Basically hovering my mouse over any image (ouside of Google Chrome/Brave/Firefox) changes the cursor to selectable after half a second or so. Took me a while to get used to. But it has ben actually useful a number of times. My most common use-case (as a front-end developer) is when people send me screenshots of bugs, and I can select, copy, paste texts from the screenshots to find the source code files =)
- wahnfrieden 4y agoit has a full dev sdk as well
- Nition 4y agoA related trick for text that you can't usually select: Hold Alt. For instance try using the mouse to select text in http://www.google.com http://www.google.com with and without Alt.
- ralfd 4y agoThis is a cool project, but this is a bit embarrassing: > I started building a text recognizer algorithm specifically designed for Impact font, and it was actually working pretty well, but I kind of misplaced the code somewhere. So, until I find it or replace it, you'll have to use Tesseract configured with the "Internet Meme" language.
- rexreed 4y agoThis project is almost a decade old! I wonder why it resurfaced? Coincidentally or perhaps not the book in the post "How to do nothing with nobody all by yourself" also is a top HN post right now. Maybe related?
- a-dub 4y agolast time i saw this the ocr component of it was tesseract (originally hp's c++ ocr engine, later acquired and open sourced by google, even later rewritten to use neural networks) compiled into webassembly.
- poulpy123 4y agowhat I would like to find is a free a cheap way to OCR my handwritten notes. I know that handwritten is much more difficult but it would be possible to use supervised learning mon my specific handwriting.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI want something similar for digitization of photos from whiteboarding sessions. I think it would be an awesome way to capture notes from design sessions while still allowing the fluidity of a real whiteboard.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoOneNote's recognition of my handwriting--once described by a tutor as 'dogs dribble'--is nothing short of miraculous. OneNote only does recognition for search and by text-block, you can't select as in the OP; would love that feature.
- poulpy123 4y agothanks I will have a look, I think my job has a license for it
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saralily 4y agoI find things like TextSniper to be more useful than this functionality, which has been in iOS and MacOS for a little bit. I use it more on hypothetically selectable elements that for whatever DOM-related reason aren't selectable than I use it on text in images.
- avmich 4y ago> Unfortunately, your browser is not yet supported Latest version of Firefox? Seriously?
- jzer0cool 4y agoWith a chrome extension, are there any trust, security, privacy issues enabling an extension with an unfamiliar organization as well as leak what sensitive images are being transferred. I wonder also why such "convert" options are not made available or are they in the works?