Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing can be very time-consuming if the settings are not properly configured. The first recommendation would be to OCR as an Additional Analysis job as you need it, and not turn it on by default in your processing profile. If this is not something that will work for you, then see below for some processing options that will prevent you from running into OCR processing that seems to run forever.


OCR Settings in FTK Central

  1. Do not OCR documents under 5120 bytes – This option is to prevent small files from going through the OCR engine. An example would be email signature images is what this option is targeting.
  2. Do not OCR documents over 2147483647 bytes – This option is to prevent large files from going through the OCR engine. This prevents your job from waiting for massive PDFs to finish OCR which will hold up your whole job.
  3. Restrict to B&W and grayscale – This option is here to prevent photos from going through the OCR engine.
  4. Only OCR PDF's with filtered text size smaller than 10,000 bytes – This option is to prevent PDFs that already have extracted text from going through the OCR engine.

Notes: Using these options above, you would be excluding documents; this is meant to prevent you from getting into trouble areas with the OCR engine. The two most important options for PDFs are 2 and 4, to keep you reliably processing and preventing a massive PDF from stopping your evidence load.