You Can Use Your iPhone to Find a Specific Book on Your Shelves

Some people organize their book shelves by author name, book title, or even by color—but if you take a more chaotic approach and can never find the book you're looking for, the optical character recognition (OCR) feature on the iPhone can help you out. 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 couldn't stop thinking about it. I tested it out by taking a picture of my book shelf, waiting a minute for the OCR processing to happen, and searching for the word "Plato", intentionally choosing one of the physically smaller books on the shelf. The result came up right away.

I tapped the photo and, sure enough, there was even a yellow marker showing me where the exact book is.

Not bad, especially considering that this wasn't a very good photo—the angle was awkward and the lighting was bad. I could imagine this being even more useful if I had a much larger bookshelf.

And it's not just useful for bookshelves. You could use this to browse your DVD, Blu-Ray, or CD collection. It could also come in very handy if you ever find yourself looking for something specific in a thrift store, or any other chaotic space with a lot of media—just take a photo, run a search, and see where the thing you're looking for is.

The Redditor speculated that this feature could also work on an Android device, and there's no reason I can think of why that wouldn't be the case. When I tried using both a Samsung phone, however, searching for book titles in Google Photos gave no results whatsoever. I tried again using the web version of Google Photos and it still didn't work. I would love to be wrong, though—if any Android users get this working, please let me know.