Photo OCR: Image to Text

Photo OCR turns a photo, a screenshot or any picture of printed text into text you can copy, edit, share and save. It reads on your phone, and it keeps every line traced to the part of the picture it came from, so when a word looks wrong you can see what the picture really says.

★ TEXT YOU CAN CHECK
Text recognition gets something a little wrong now and then: a 1 read as an l, a smudge read as a comma. Photo OCR does not hide that. Tap any line and the part of the picture it was read from appears right under it, large enough to compare. Words the recognizer was unsure of are underlined, and each line names them in words; a word without a mark can be wrong too. Nothing is corrected behind your back - what you see is what was read, until you change it yourself.

★ COLUMNS, RECEIPTS AND CAPTIONS IN READING ORDER
A simple reader goes straight down the page, so two columns come out mixed line by line and a caption gets glued to the paragraph under it. Photo OCR works out the order from the layout of the page: one column after the other, a receipt row by row with each price beside its item, and headings and captions as paragraphs of their own. A photo taken at an angle is read level.

★ PARAGRAPHS OR LINES
Choose paragraphs, where the lines of each paragraph become one for pasting into a message or a document, or keep the page's own line breaks for an address, a list or a poem. A word split by a hyphen at the end of a line is left as it was printed, for you to decide.

★ THREE WAYS IN
- Choose a picture with Android's photo picker.
- Take a photo with your phone's own camera app.
- Share a screenshot or a photo to Photo OCR from any other app.
No permission is asked for: the photo picker hands over only the picture you choose, and your camera app takes the photo itself.

★ A HISTORY OF WHAT YOU READ
Each reading is kept with a smaller copy of its picture, so you can come back and check a line weeks later. Search your readings by any word, edit the text, copy it, share it, or save it as a .txt file in a folder you pick. Deleting a reading deletes its picture too.

★ WHAT STAYS ON YOUR PHONE
Your pictures and your text stay on your phone. The text leaves the app only when you copy, share or save it, and the app never sends a picture anywhere. Your readings are left out of Android's cloud backup as well.
The text is read by Google's ML Kit recognizer, which is built into the app, so reading a picture needs no internet connection. ML Kit does send Google diagnostics about how it runs - device and app details, an identifier for this installation, how long reading took, the picture's format and size, and error codes - and Google's list of what it collects leaves out the picture and the text. The ads use the internet too. There is no account and no sign-up.

★ WHAT IT READS, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
- Printed text and text on screens, in the Latin alphabet: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, Vietnamese and more.
- It is not made for writing done by hand, and it does not read other alphabets.
- Very small, blurred or shadowed print can be missed. Good light and a steady hand help most.

Ads: a full-screen ad now and then when you leave a result after copying, sharing or saving its text - never while a picture is being read and never while you are editing. Watch a short video in Settings to turn ads off for a day.

Privacy policy: https://dash-fusion.github.io/privacy/list-ocr