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That's a bummer. I'm trying to do the exact same thing right now, digitize family photos. Some of mine have German on the back. The last OCR to hit headlines wa

That's a bummer. I'm trying to do the exact same thing right now, digitize family photos. Some of mine have German on the back. The last OCR to hit headlines was terrible, was hoping this would be better. ChatGPT 4o has been good though, when I paste individual images into the chat. I haven't tried with the API yet, not sure how much that would cost me to process 6500 photos, many of which are blank but I don't have an easy way to filter them either.

bosie 2y ago
Use a local rubbish model to extract text. If it doesn’t find any on the back, don’t send it to chatgtp? Terrascan comes to mind
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  "Terrascan" is a vision model? The only hits I'm getting are for a static code analyzer.
  - bosie 2y ago
    sorry, i meant "Tesseract"
notsylver 2y ago
I found 4o to be one of the worst, but I was using the API. I didn't test it but sometimes it feels like images uploaded through ChatGPT work better than ones through the API. I was using Gemini Flash in the end, it seemed better than 4o and the images are so cheap that I have a hard time believing google is making any money even by bandwidth costs I also tried preprocessing images before sending them through. I tried cropping it to just the text to see if it helped. Then I tried filtering on top to try brighten the text, somehow that all made it worse. The most success I had was just holding the image in my hand and taking a photo of it, the busy background seemed to help but I have absolutely no idea why. The main problem was that it would work well for a few dozen images, you'd start to trust it, and then it'd hallucinate or not understand a crossed out word with a correction or wouldn't see text that had faded. I've pretty much given up on the idea. My new plan is to repurpose the website I made for verifying the results into one where you enter the text manually, as well as date/location/favourite status.

bosie 2y ago

Use a local rubbish model to extract text. If it doesn’t find any on the back, don’t send it to chatgtp? Terrascan comes to mind

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
"Terrascan" is a vision model? The only hits I'm getting are for a static code analyzer.
- bosie 2y ago
  sorry, i meant "Tesseract"

notsylver 2y ago

I found 4o to be one of the worst, but I was using the API. I didn't test it but sometimes it feels like images uploaded through ChatGPT work better than ones through the API. I was using Gemini Flash in the end, it seemed better than 4o and the images are so cheap that I have a hard time believing google is making any money even by bandwidth costs I also tried preprocessing images before sending them through. I tried cropping it to just the text to see if it helped. Then I tried filtering on top to try brighten the text, somehow that all made it worse. The most success I had was just holding the image in my hand and taking a photo of it, the busy background seemed to help but I have absolutely no idea why. The main problem was that it would work well for a few dozen images, you'd start to trust it, and then it'd hallucinate or not understand a crossed out word with a correction or wouldn't see text that had faded. I've pretty much given up on the idea. My new plan is to repurpose the website I made for verifying the results into one where you enter the text manually, as well as date/location/favourite status.