Feature request: OCR for Search
Just something for the long-term wish list, OCR!
I've been known to waste time searching for a text phrase that I was sure was in a recent OP, only to discover (much later) that it was a meme/gif/jpg and so ofc the search engine would never find it.
I've been impressed at the advances in OCR over the last few decades. I think it would be a cool feature to automatically scan in still images and add in the OCR'd text so searches could find them 
Yeah I know. Not a top priority, but if you're looking for things to do!
= new reply since forum marked as read
about OCR and its adoption. When an OCR appears on the tv screen, some of them have told me never to point my phone at it for reasons involving the ability to hack the phone... 
Maybe some of the IT gurus can weigh in... Overblown concerns or not? (and yes, I acknowledge use of OCR on a protected website likely affords a very different risk than such public examples)
OCR itself just converts images of text into text. You're confusing OCR with QR codes, which are intended to make it easy for you to point at them and have your phone go to a specific web site.
QR codes are no more dangerous than going to any random URL (web site), but yeah, a malicious QR code could cause you to go to a web site that tries to break into your (phone / pc / whatever). There are risks in going to any web site, but modern browsers are pretty decent in avoiding "drive by" compromises. And my iPhone (I don't know about Android) will see a QR code but *ask* for permission before it goes to the web site. It's automatic to figure out the URL from the QR code but there's always another step before your phone actually uses that information for anything.
What I'm suggesting for DU is to just save the text of the image with the image and make it available to the search engines. DU is already quite good at stripping out advanced HTML out of people's posts to make this site safe. A simple OCR pass on still images followed by a 'strip HTML' would be fine I think
p.s. Hi Neighbor! I'm also in Colorado.
fellow Coloradoan.