It would also appear to be a very limited use feature.

Have you considered a standard ocr application and then creating a database/spreadsheet of extracted texts. Then you can enter the filename of the project object you want to attach the text to, the field it should go in, and export the data to a CSV or xml file. Then simply use the Menu>File>Import from database… command

There is a post, https://dzone.com/articles/reading-text-from-images-using-java-1
that shows some of the issues involved with including ocr. With jAlbum being multilingual, the size of the application would soon ballon to that of ‘bloat ware’. jAlbum also want to limit external library dependencies. Saving to a database should be more flexible too.

One option would be to copy your original images into jAlbum, instead of using them for your project. If you don’t want to do that then another a new external tool would be needed. For that though, the text from the ocr would need to be:
A plain utf8 text file.
Each file named the same as the image, e.g. image1.jpg > image1.txt
The text files stored either in a separate directory or in each of the project’s image directory.

I think I have an external tool that could be modified to read those files and add the text to the image comment fields.

Unlikely these days, but some skins might still read such text files (within the project image directories) directly. You would need to try it or ask the skin developer.

Thanks. I am not sure I would really be able to modify the skins too much myself as I am not a developer. I use Tiger. I can however generate .txt files from a bash script (that s how I generated the csv file in the first place). If you already have an external tool handy that maps .txt files to comments or some other field, for sure I would be interested!

I found a tool that I could modify without to much effort, see attached. You can rename it as desired, just add it to the tools directory of jAlbum's configuration directory.

When you run it it will ask for the location of your text files, they can be in the project directory along with the images they are for, or in a separate directory - all in one place if easier.

Select the directory containing the text files and click OK. When it has finished open the system console (F7) to see a list of files that have text files matching them and if the comments were updated or not. Obviously, if the text files are all in one directory then each image must have a unique name - unless it is an intention duplicate.

It is set to replace any existing comments with those from the text files, if one exists. It is an easy change to make it prepend or append to existing comments.

Please let me know how it goes

@RobM: thanks a lot, I will try it next week.
@davidekholm: there are several reasons. One is that my pictures are in a local folder that is synchronized with a cloud storage, so each change would trigger a lot of network traffic. The jalbum album files generate less traffic. Another is that I try to keep my pictures read-only to avoid any mistake, which is not compatible with a third party software like jAlbum modifying the originals.

Hi RobM,
thanks for the tool. I will have more time now to work on this. I tried it and right now, the tool parses the complete album, not only the current directory that I see in the "Explorer" view. As my album has 100s or 1000s folders, it will take a huge amount of time even if only the comments of a few pictures have to change. Would it be possible to adjust the script so only the currently open folder is parsed (also, I d rather the subfolders NOT parsed, to be on the safe side) ? I guess this line should simply be updated by not sure how?
for (AlbumObject ao : rootFolder.getDescendants())
Thanks,
Yvan