Bing Can Search For Text Inside SkyDrive Photos On Windows 8.1

While you can bet on the fact that a team over at Redmond is brainstorming potential names to rename the SkyDrive service, Microsoft keeps on improving its cloud offering in the meantime.

It was just in late August when the company announced the integration of its Bing optical character recognition technology with SkyDrive. This allowed users of the cloud storage service to upload their photos and have any text in the image extracted.

The text is then displayed clearly on a pane on the right side of a photo.

Now Microsoft is extending this particular feature to Windows 8.1 and the built-in Bing search function in the operating system — it was only a matter of time, really.

The company talked about this in a post on the SkyDrive website, saying that it is rolling out this new feature that will allow Windows 8.1 users to search directly from their PC any and all text data that is found in the images on their SkyDrive camera roll.

Here are the nifty details:

“For example, you might have taken a photo 6 months ago of the menu of your favorite restaurant, but can’t remember where it’s buried in your Camera Roll and want to remember the dish you had. You can simply type in the restaurant name on your desktop and Bing Smart Search will search text of your Camera Roll photos and pull up the picture of the menu with the restaurant name printed on it.”

The video below shows SkyDrive in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O22MbUCC3sA

The blog post confirms that this feature will work even if the photos have been assigned “online-only” access. SkyDrive, like Bing, is deeply integrated in Windows 8.1, and this new feature is a sure highlight of how Redmond is bringing its cloud and search technology to good use on PCs and tablets.

Now all we need is a brilliant new name for SkyDrive, and we will be all set.