Configuring Indexing of Text in TIFF Image Documents

New in Windows 7 is the ability for users to search for text within TIFF image documents that are compliant with the TIFF 6.0 specification. This capability uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing and is not enabled by default.

Important Enabling the indexing of text in TIFF image documents can result in significant processing overhead.

Configuring Indexing of Text in TIFF Image Documents Using Control Panel

To enable the indexing of text in TIFF image documents manually on a computer running Windows 7, perform the following steps:

1. Open Control Panel, click Programs, and then click Turn Windows Features On Or Off.
2. Select the Windows TIFF IFilter check box and click OK.
3. Rebuild the index if you have existing TIFF image documents in the indexing scope on your computer.

Note If your TIFF image documents are stored on a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2, you can use the Add Features Wizard to add the Windows TIFF IFilter feature so you can enable the indexing of text in TIFF image documents stored on the server.

Configuring Indexing of Text in TIFF Image Documents Using Group Policy

You can use Group Policy to configure how indexing text in TIFF image documents takes place. The applicable policy settings are found under:

Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Search \OCR\

The policy settings for configuring the indexing of text in TIFF image documents are as follows:

• Force TIFF IFilter To Perform OCR For Every Page In A TIFF Document Lets users turn off the performance optimization so that the TIFF IFilter performs OCR for every page in a TIFF document, which allows indexing of all recognized text. By default, the TIFF IFilter optimizes its performance by skipping OCR for document pages that have non-text content (such as photos). In some cases, pages that contain text can be misclassified as non-text pages. If this is the case, the text in these pages will not be indexed.
  If you enable this setting, TIFF IFilter will perform OCR for every page in a TIFF document to index all recognized text. Therefore, the OCR process will be slower. This decrease in performance can be significant if there are a great deal of non-text pages in TIFF documents on the system.
  If you disable or do not configure this setting, TIFF IFilter optimizes its performance by skipping non-text content during the OCR process.
• Select OCR Languages From A Code Page This policy setting allows the selection of OCR languages that belong to one of the supported code pages. If you enable this policy setting, the selected OCR languages are used in OCR processing during the indexing of TIFF files. The default system language is ignored unless it is among the selected OCR languages. If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, only the default system language is used.
  All selected OCR languages must belong to the same code page. If you select languages from more than one code page, the entire OCR language selection is ignored and only the default system language is used.
  Re-indexing is not initiated when you enable this policy and select OCR languages. This policy setting applies only to the indexing of new files unless re-indexing is initiated manually.