Scan Image

Text trapped in a photograph is useless until you can select it. A printed address, a page of handwriting-adjacent notes, a recipe in a book, a serial number on the back of a router — all things you photograph and then retype by hand. Scan Image removes the retyping.

Take a photo, or pick any picture from your gallery, and the text in it is read and handed back as text you can edit, copy, search or send somewhere else. It works on photographs you took for another reason entirely, so an image from three months ago is just as usable as one taken a minute ago.

The reading happens on your phone. That is the part worth being precise about, because this is the feature most likely to be pointed at something sensitive — a letter, a payslip, a medical form. The photo is not uploaded to our servers, and the extracted text is yours alone.

Results depend on the photo, as they do everywhere. Clear, flat, well-lit text in a normal typeface reads almost perfectly; a curved page in bad light does not. If the source is a document rather than a scene, Scan Documents will usually give a better result, because it straightens the page before anything tries to read it.