Extracting text from a flattened image

Is it possible to extract text from a flattened jpg image. I have many and would like to recover the caption that was saved as part of the jpg. I've included an example image here:
Example < http://picasaweb.google.com/anonemator97/Album1/photo#506569 6772457743986>

Yes, it is possible with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, though not with Photoshop.

Depends what you mean by 'recover' the caption. In the example you gave of course it is only a few words and so would probably be easier to re-type it than use OCR.

However, I guess you want to re-create the appearance as well as the text itself, ie. the font information. It is not possible to get the font information from a jpeg. You can do one of two things:

You could trace the text (Illustrator would be the better tool) to create a scalable vector file. This would be quite troublesome to do well and the text would still not be editable, just scalable.

You could find out what font was used to create the text, install the font if you don't have it, and re-create it from scratch. You can try this link to try to find out which font was used:

<http://www.identifont.com/>

I didn't mean to imply I need to recover the font style and most captions are longer. I was thinking of OCR, but is there a way to automate the process (script, maybe?) to select the text area (which is always a plain white box at the bottom of the image with black text) and process the text? I would like to then take the text and place it into the EXIF caption field for each image and save as a psd. There's about 10,000 images, so I'd like to automate as much as possible.

What version of Photoshop are you using?

You could process them using a variable data script, but this would still require you to look at them individually, and to transcribe the captions into an Excel file (I think).

You may be better off researching and/or asking about this in the scripting forum, if your version of Photoshop supports it:
<http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ef7f2cb>

It might be worth it to invest your time up front, learning how to do this, rather than spending it on the back end, doing them all individually.

I'll upgrade if a newer version would save significant time.

“ “ “ “ “

Answer the question I asked you.

(That's kind of the whole point here, n'est pas?)

Currently, version 7.

Version 7 has no support for variable data integration. Sooo, that suggests that you'll need to update your version of Photoshop if you want to go that route. Version 7 does have support for scripting, but I'm not sure if that's a robust enough toolset for what you need to do.

But first, I again suggest you head over to the scripting forum (linked above) and ask there. No matter how you look at it, you have an unusual and difficult task ahead of you. I wish I could offer a more complete solution, but it's beyond anything I've ever needed to do.