Free OCR API and Online OCR
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Online OCR - How to use it
The OCR.space Online OCR service converts scans or (smartphone) images of text documents into editable files by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The OCR software also can get text from PDF.
Our Online OCR service is free to use, no registration necessary. Just upload your image files. The OCR software takes JPG, PNG, GIF images or PDF documents as input. PDF OCR supports multi-page documents and multi-column text. The only restriction of the free online OCR that the images/PDF must not be larger than 5MB. If you need to automate your OCR and process many documents, do not web-scrape this page. It is made for humans, not computers. Instead, please use the provided free OCR API.
Your data is safe: This Online OCR service and the OCR API store no data, as outlined in our strict privacy policy.
Supported OCR languages
Each of the four OCR Engines uses different recognition methods and supports different OCR languages. We recommend that you try each one to find out which one works best for your documents. If you need help selecting the best OCR engine for your project, please contact us.
| OCR Language: | OCR Engine 1 | OCR Engine 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic OCR | Yes | - |
| Bulgarian OCR | Yes | - |
| Chinese OCR (Simplified and traditional characters) | Yes | Yes (including vertical OCR) |
| Croatian OCR | Yes | - |
| Danish OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Dutch OCR | Yes | Yes |
| English OCR (*) | Yes | Yes |
| Finnish OCR | Yes | Yes |
| French OCR | Yes | Yes |
| German OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Greek OCR | Yes | - |
| Hindi OCR | (Planned) | - |
| Hungarian OCR | Yes | - |
| Italian OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Japanese OCR | Yes | Yes (including vertical OCR) |
| Korean OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Kannada OCR | (Planned) | - |
| Norwegian OCR | - | Yes |
| Persian(Farsi) OCR | (Planned) | - |
| Polish OCR | Yes | - |
| Portuguese OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Russian OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Slovenian OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Swedish OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Tamil OCR | (Planned) | - |
| Telugu OCR | (Planned) | - |
| Thai OCR | - | Yes |
| Turkish OCR | Yes | - |
| Ukrainian OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Vietnamese OCR | - | Yes |
Special characters like §%&()=@€ | Yes (limited) | Yes |
| Language autodetection | - | Yes |
(*) English OCR is always included: In addition to the selected OCR language (e. g. Japanese), the English alphabet is also recognized.
Get your own, private, secure OCR portal page
If you want to convert larger PDF documents without page and size limit you can subscribe to our PRO PDF plan . In addition to the PRO version of the API, this plan includes a custom OCR form just like the one on this page but without the page and size limits. So you can use the power of our PDF OCR solution even without using the OCR API directly, at no extra costs. If you have any questions, please contact us.