Image to Text OCR: Bulk Images & Scanned PDFs, 38 Languages

Extract text from images and scanned PDFs in bulk — screenshots, photos of documents, receipts, scans — with the confidence and position of every line and word.

• Images and scanned PDFs. PNG, JPG, WebP, TIFF (multi-page), GIF, BMP, iPhone HEIC/HEIF, AVIF and PDF pages; choose pages like 1-3,5,8-.
• 38 languages, several at once: English, Ukrainian, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Czech, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and more.
• Structured output. Plain text with paragraphs, plus lines and (optionally) words with confidence 0–100 and bounding boxes in pixels of the original image — ready for highlighting, redaction or data extraction.
• Auto-rotate for pages scanned sideways or upside down; small images are upscaled automatically.
• Private: runs on Tesseract inside the Actor — your images are not sent to any third-party OCR service.

Why this Actor

	This Actor	Typical alternatives in the Apify Store (Oct 2026)
Price	$1.50 per 1,000 images	$2–6.50 per 1,000
Output	Text plus every line and word with confidence and bounding box	Often plain text only
Languages	38, several at once — incl. Ukrainian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi	Often English-first
Scans	Scanned PDFs and multi-page TIFFs page by page, auto-rotate	Often images only
Privacy	OCR runs inside the Actor — images are not sent to Google or other OCR APIs	Several wrap Google Lens

Input

{
  "sources": [{ "url": "https://example.com/receipt.jpg" }, { "url": "https://example.com/scan.pdf" }],
  "languages": ["eng", "ukr"],
  "pages": "1-3",
  "layout": "auto",
  "autoRotate": false,
  "includeLines": true,
  "includeWords": false
}

Field	Meaning
sources	URLs of images or PDFs. Files in your own Apify key-value store work too: set the store's access to "Anyone with ID can read" and use https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store ID>/records/<key> (the Actor runs with limited permissions and does not use your token).
languages	Tesseract codes: eng, ukr, rus, deu, fra, spa, chi_sim, jpn, ara…
pages	Pages of PDFs and multi-page TIFFs, empty = all
layout	auto (documents, columns), single-block, single-line, sparse (screenshots, receipts, signs)
autoRotate	Detect and fix page orientation before OCR
includeLines / includeWords	Return lines / words with confidence and bounding box

Output

One item per image or PDF page:

{
  "url": "https://example.com/scan.pdf",
  "fileName": "scan.pdf",
  "kind": "pdf",
  "page": 1,
  "totalPages": 3,
  "languages": ["eng", "ukr"],
  "text": "Quarterly Supply Report\n\nThe warehouse in Lviv received 1,240 pallets...",
  "meanConfidence": 95.0,
  "lines": [{ "text": "Quarterly Supply Report", "confidence": 96.3, "bbox": [63, 59, 766, 55] }],
  "width": 2480,
  "height": 3508
}

bbox is [x, y, width, height] in pixels. A file that cannot be downloaded or opened gets an error field instead and is not charged.

Pricing

Event	Price	What counts
image	$1.50 per 1,000	one OCR'd image, TIFF frame or PDF page

Plus Apify's standard start fee of $0.05 per 1,000 runs. The run stops before it would exceed your maximum charge per run.

Related Actors

• Document to Markdown for AI — PDFs, scans and Office files → Markdown, tables, RAG chunks
• PDF to Image & Image Converter — PDF ↔ PNG/JPG/WebP, HEIC → JPG
• Office to PDF & PDF/A — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML → PDF/PDF-A
• Audio & Video Transcriber — speech to text, SRT and VTT subtitles

Open source: github.com/AndriyVK/-apify-document-tools

Use with AI agents and code

• MCP (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, any MCP client): add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=ai_admin/image-to-text-ocr as an MCP server — the agent gets one tool with this Actor's input schema and pays per use through your Apify account.
• One HTTP call that returns the results:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/ai_admin~image-to-text-ocr/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"sources": [{"url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/FloomuI2DrQCJazY8/records/image-en.png"}], "languages": ["eng"], "includeLines": true}'

• Agentic payments: the Actor is enabled for Apify's agentic payments (x402), so autonomous agents can pay per run.

Limits

• Handwriting is recognised poorly; printed text works best. Photos should be in focus, at least ~20 px letter height.
• Password-protected PDFs are not supported. Maximum download size is 200 MB per file.
• For PDFs with a text layer (not scans) use Document to Markdown — it is faster and exact.