First of all, Evernote is a note-taking program built for PC, Mac, mobile phones, and the web. Evernote keeps all your notes in sync, so if you make a note on your PC, you can view it on your phone, and vice versa. Each note you take is uploaded to your Evernote account on the Internet, allowing you to sign in over the Internet and view your notes. Besides that, you can also take pictures with your cell phone and upload them to your notes.

Among all the cool things built into Evernote, one of the coolest is its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature. Along with the ability to take and upload photos, the OCR function scans the image and indexes all the text it can read. This means that you can search for text in your images. With this ability, the possibilities are endless!

Here are some potential uses:

  • Empty your wallet of business cards
  • Take a quick photo of a flyer
  • take notes from a book
  • Take a picture of what’s on the board.
  • Create a takeaway menu catalog
  • Take a quick photo of what’s on your monitor

Now, some of you may be a bit skeptical about Evernote’s accuracy. For the most part, Evernote’s OCR works very well. All images below were taken with a 3.2 MP camera phone. Evernote OCR will work with images of any resolution, but the higher the resolution (or megapixels for less technical ones), the better the accuracy. Also, if the image is blurry, OCR won’t work as well. OCR has improved a lot over the years, but it’s still not perfect.

I was surprised at how well Evernote’s OCR indexed the textbook image even though the text was small and almost unreadable in places. Having a high resolution camera phone (3.2MP compared to standard 1.3MP camera phones) definitely makes OCR more accurate. Although the software was able to recognize handwriting, don’t expect it in all cases. Evernote is extremely picky about the handwriting it can recognize. In other words, if you have messy writing, don’t count on Evernote being able to read it.

Evernote is free to use, but has a 40MB limit for free accounts. 40MB is plenty of space for a large amount of data, but if you need more space, they offer premium memberships for $5/month that include 500MB of space and priority OCR. I found that it only takes a few minutes (1-5) to scan my images with a free account, which should be pretty quick for most users.

Once all is said and done, Evernote stands out as an exceptional and unique note-taking tool. It’s not the ability to sync notes between multiple computers and phones that sets Evernote apart, but the OCR feature that makes note-taking a breeze. Forget writing what you see; all you need to do now is take a photo!