# Convert Image to Text Python wrapper to grab text from all the images in a directory and save a subdirectory as text files using [Tesseract Engine](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract). > Tesseract is an optical character recognition engine for various operating systems. It is free software, released under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and development has been sponsored by Google since 2006. In 2006 Tesseract was considered one of the most accurate open-source OCR engines then available. ### Usage ``` [sudo] apt-get install tesseract-ocr ``` ``` python main.py <input_directory> <output_directory> ``` ``` usage: main.py [-h] input_dir [output_dir] positional arguments: input_dir output_dir optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit ``` output_dir is optional. Defaults to input_dir + '/converted_text/' ### Example ``` python main.py sample/ ``` or ``` python main.py sample/ output/ ``` ### Sample image taken (Wikipedia page for Google | Lang : Simple English)  ### Text output ``` A man signing in at Google’s main afice, Googleplex. Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation that is best known for running one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web (WWW). Every day, 200 million (200,000,000) people use it. Google’s main office (“Googleplex”) is in Mountain View, California, USA. With Google Search, people can also search for pictures, Usenet newsgroups, news, and things to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web pages on its database, 880 million (880,000,000) pictures and 845 million (845,000,000) Usenet messages — six billion things. “To google,” as an action word (verb) means “to search for something on Google”. Because Google is so popular (more than half of people on the web use it) it has been used to mean “to search the web”. Google dislikes this use since the name of the company is a trademark. As a public company, Google Inc. trades on the NASDAQ under the tickers GOOG and GOOGL. In August 2015, Google announced it was being restruc- tured under a new holding company called Alphabet Inc. 1 History Google was started in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, USA. It used to be called Backrub. Later, they made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, Cal- ifornia. Later that year, it moved to another place, now called the “Googleplex”. In September 2001, Google’s rating system (“PageR- ank”, for saying which information is more helpful) got a US. Patent. The patent was to Stanford University, with Lawrence (Larry) Page as the inventor (the person who first had the idea). Google makes an important, though shrinking, percent- age of its money through its friends like America Online and InterActiveCorp. It has a special group known as the Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps make contracts, helps making accounts better, and gives engi- neering help. 2 How Google makes money Google makes money by advertising. People or compa- nies who want people to buy their product, service, or ideas give Google money, and Google shows an adver- tisement to people Google thinks will click on the adver- tisement. Google only gets money when people click on the link, so it tries to know as much about people as pos- sible to only show the advertisement to the “right people”. It does this with Google Analytics, which sends data back to Google whenever someone visits a web site. From this and other data, Google makes a profile about the person, which it then uses to figure out which advertisements to show. 3 The name “Google” The name “Google” is a misspelling of the word g00g01.[7][8] Milton Sirotta, nephew of US. mathemati- cian Edward Kasner, made this word in 1938, for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes ( 10100 ). It is said that the word “googol” was chosen as a name for this number because it sounded like baby talk. Google uses this word because the company wants to make lots of stuff on the Web easy to find and use. Andy Bechtol- sheim first thought of the name. The name for Google’s main office, the “Googleplex,” is a play on a different, even bigger number, the "googolpleX", which is 1 followed by one googol of zeroes. ```