To provide a system wherein a load on the system is significantly reduced, when calling a document image read by a scanner in retrieval and wherein speed of the retrieval, browsing, and downloading or editing is improved.

When document image data read is converted by the scanner into a tag type image format, individual image file of each page is generated, an identifier common to the image file and character coordinate information are imparted to a text data file obtained by applying OCR (optical character recognition) processing to the image file, and the text data file is stored. When a search request is received, the image file having the identifier common to a text file having character information according with a search character is called out, and a search target is emphatically displayed.