s3-ocr 0.1a0

Tools for running OCR against files stored in S3

s3-ocr

Tools for running OCR against files stored in S3

Installation

Install this tool using pip:

pip install s3-ocr

Usage

The start command loops through every PDF file in a bucket (every file ending in .pdf) and submits it to Textract for OCR processing.

You need to have AWS configured using environment variables or a credentials file in your home directory.

You can start the process running like this:

s3-ocr start name-of-your-bucket

OCR can take some time. The results of the OCR will be stored in textract-output in your bucket.

Changes made to your bucket

To keep track of which files have been submitted for processing, s3-ocr will create a JSON file for every file that it adds to the OCR queue.

This file will be called:

path-to-file/name-of-file.pdf.s3-ocr.json

Each of these JSON files contains data that looks like this:

{
  "job_id": "a34eb4e8dc7e70aa9668f7272aa403e85997364199a654422340bc5ada43affe",
  "etag": "\"b0c77472e15500347ebf46032a454e8e\""
}

The recorded job_id can be used later to associate the file with the results of the OCR task in textract-output/.

The etag is the ETag of the S3 object at the time it was submitted. This can be used later to determine if a file has changed since it last had OCR run against it.

This design for the tool, with the .s3-ocr.json files tracking jobs that have been submitted, means that it is safe to run s3-ocr start against the same bucket multiple times without the risk of starting duplicate OCR jobs.

Checking status

The s3-ocr status <bucket-name> command shows a rough indication of progress through the tasks:

% s3-ocr status sfms-history
153 complete out of 532 jobs

It compares the jobs that have been submitted, based on .s3-ocr.json files, to the jobs that have their results written to the textract-output/ folder.

Not yet implemented

• A command to retrieve the OCR results and load them into a searchable SQLite database table.

Development

To contribute to this tool, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd s3-ocr
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest