Image OCR: Image to Text in Bulk, with Tesseract or AI Vision

Extract text from many images in one run. Give it direct image links, web pages whose images you want read, or an Apify key-value store full of image files, and get one clean result per image: the full text, its language, a confidence score, image size and, in fast mode, every line and block with its position. From $2 per 1,000 images.

Two modes:

• Fast (Tesseract): open-source OCR in 24 languages. Best for scans, printed documents, screenshots and clean images. Rotates sideways and upside-down pages automatically and returns bounding boxes for lines, blocks and (optionally) words.
• AI vision: a Claude vision model reads the image like a person would. Much better on handwriting, receipts, photos of signs, phone pictures, low-quality or skewed images and mixed languages. It can also return typed fields for receipts, invoices and business cards.

What can this image to text tool do?

• OCR images in bulk from links (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF), web pages or a key-value store.
• Return positions of lines, blocks and words for layout-aware processing.
• Turn receipts and invoices into data: merchant, date, line items, subtotal, tax, tip, total, payment method; invoice numbers, dates, vendor, customer and totals; business card name, title, company, emails, phones and address.
• Skip images without text and small icons free of charge.

What data do you get?

Field	Description
imageUrl, sourcePage, sourceType, mode, status	The image and how it was read
text	Full text in reading order
language, confidence	Detected language and a 0-1 confidence
width, height, format, lineCount, charCount	Image and text stats
lines, blocks, words	Fast mode: text with bbox {x, y, width, height} and confidence
documentType, readability, structured	AI mode: kind of image and typed receipt/invoice/business-card fields

Who uses it?

• Operations and finance teams turning receipts and invoices into spreadsheet rows.
• Researchers and archivists transcribing scanned letters and historical documents.
• E-commerce and marketing teams reading text inside product images and banners.
• Developers who need an OCR step in an automation without hosting Tesseract or a vision model.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start).
2. Add Image URLs, Web pages or a Key-value store ID.
3. Choose OCR mode (fast or ai) and Languages.
4. For receipts or invoices, choose AI mode and a Structured fields type.
5. Run it and export to Excel, CSV or JSON.

Input example

{
  "imageUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdoc/main/images/eurotext.png"
    }
  ],
  "mode": "fast",
  "languages": [
    "eng",
    "deu"
  ],
  "includeBoundingBoxes": true,
  "skipImagesWithoutText": true
}

Output example

{
  "imageUrl": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdoc/main/images/eurotext.png",
  "sourcePage": null,
  "sourceType": "url",
  "mode": "fast",
  "status": "ok",
  "width": 640,
  "height": 500,
  "format": "PNG",
  "text": "The (quick) [brown] {fox} jumps!\nOver the $43,456.78 <lazy> #90 dog\n& duck/goose, as 12.5% of E-mail\nfrom aspammer@website.com is spam.\nDer ,.schnelle” braune Fuchs springt\niiber den faulen Hund. Le renard brun\n«rapide»...",
  "language": "es",
  "confidence": 0.917,
  "lineCount": 12,
  "rotationApplied": 0,
  "ocrLanguages": "eng",
  "lines": [
    {
      "text": "The (quick) [brown] {fox} jumps!",
      "confidence": 0.958,
      "bbox": {
        "x": 65,
        "y": 41,
        "width": 450,
        "height": 30
      },
      "block": 1
    },
    {
      "text": "Over the $43,456.78 <lazy> #90 dog",
      "confidence": 0.943,
      "bbox": {
        "x": 65,
        "y": 72,
        "width": 490,
        "height": 31
      },
      "block": 1
    },
    {
      "text": "& duck/goose, as 12.5% of E-mail",
      "confidence": 0.948,
      "bbox": {
        "x": 64,
        "y": 103,
        "width": 458,
        "height": 26
      },
      "block": 1
    }
  ],
  "blocks": [
    {
      "text": "The (quick) [brown] {fox} jumps!\nOver the $43,456.78 <lazy> #90 dog\n& duck/goose, as 12.5% of E-mail\nfrom aspammer@website.com is spam.\nDer ,.schnelle” braune Fuchs springt\niiber den faulen Hund. Le renard brun\n«rapide»...",
      "confidence": 0.917,
      "bbox": {
        "x": 61,
        "y": 41,
        "width": 513,
        "height": 372
      }
    }
  ],
  "charCount": 414
}

How much does it cost?

Mode	Price per image	Per 1,000 images
Fast (Tesseract)	$0.002	$2
AI vision	$0.009	$9
AI vision with your own Anthropic key	$0.003	$3 (plus your own AI usage)

Plus a $0.00005 start fee per run. Examples: 500 scanned pages in fast mode cost $1.00; 200 receipts in AI mode with structured fields cost $1.80. Errors, skipped small images and (with "Skip images without text") empty images are free.

Volume discounts on higher Apify plans. The prices above are for the Apify Free plan. Fast-mode OCR gets cheaper automatically on paid plans: about 15% lower on Bronze, 25% lower on Silver and 38% lower on Gold and above.

Use it via API, Make, Zapier, n8n or an AI agent

Apify API. Start a run and get the results back in one HTTP request (replace YOUR_API_TOKEN with the token from Apify Console > Settings > Integrations):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plotpointtech~image-to-text-ocr-bulk/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"imageUrls": [{"url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdoc/main/images/eurotext.png"}], "mode": "fast", "languages": ["eng", "deu"], "includeBoundingBoxes": true, "skipImagesWithoutText": true}'

For longer jobs, start the run asynchronously and read the dataset when it finishes. Official apify-client libraries exist for Python and JavaScript; the API tab on this page has ready-made code.

No-code automation. Connect the tool to Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable or any webhook with Apify integrations, and use Schedules in Apify Console to run it hourly, daily or weekly.

AI agents (MCP). Give Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code or any MCP-compatible agent direct access to this tool through the hosted Apify MCP server. Add this server URL to your client:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=plotpointtech/image-to-text-ocr-bulk

The agent can then call the tool with the same input fields shown above and read the results.

FAQ

Is it legal to OCR images? Yes, for images you have the right to use. Business cards, receipts and documents can contain personal data: handle results according to the privacy rules that apply to you, such as GDPR.

Which mode should I use? Fast for printed documents, scans and screenshots, especially when you need positions. AI for handwriting, photos, receipts, invoices, signs and low-quality images.

Does AI mode translate? No. It transcribes the text as written. It may occasionally misread unclear characters, so check important figures.

Which files are supported? JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and TIFF up to 25 MB. SVG, HEIC and PDF are not supported (use our PDF to Text & Tables Extractor for PDFs).

Is my API key safe? Your own Anthropic key is stored as an encrypted secret input and never logged.

Related tools from Plot Point Technologies

• PDF to Text & Tables Extractor - Markdown + OCR, $0.40/1K: PDFs to text, Markdown and CSV tables, with OCR for scans.
• Bulk Image Downloader - All Images from Any Website + ZIP: every image from a page or site, de-duplicated, with ZIP.
• AI Web Scraper - Extract Any Website to JSON in Plain English: describe the fields you want and get JSON from any web page.

Plot Point Technologies is not affiliated with Anthropic, Google or the Tesseract project.

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