OCR API: Image & PDF to Text Extractor, 100+ Languages

Extract the text from images, screenshots, photos and PDFs, digital or scanned, in 100+ languages, in bulk. Get clean text per page, with the OCR confidence and word count.

• Digital PDFs are read directly from their text layer: instant and exact.
• Scanned PDFs and images go through OCR (Tesseract), with automatic straightening of sideways or upside-down pages.

No API key, no Google account, no subscription: pay per page.

Why this one?

• Smart PDF handling. Text pages are read directly; only scanned pages use OCR. Faster and more accurate than OCR-ing everything.
• Mixed languages. Read documents that mix English, Spanish, German, French... in one pass. 100+ languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi and Russian.
• Upside-down and rotated pages are detected and fixed.
• Bulk. Hundreds of files per run, straight from their URLs.
• Cheap. A fraction of what OCR APIs charge per page.

Use cases

• Invoices, receipts and forms: get the text out for bookkeeping, search or AI extraction.
• Scanned contracts and archives: make old documents searchable.
• Screenshots and social images: pull quotes, prices and posts out of images.
• AI pipelines: feed clean text into ChatGPT, Claude or your RAG system.
• Translation: extract the text first, then translate it.

Input

Field	What it does
Image or PDF URLs	JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, BMP, GIF or PDF links, one per line.
Languages	Every language the text may contain: en, es, de, fr, zh, ja, ar... or Tesseract codes (chi_sim).
Max pages per PDF	Stop after N pages of each PDF.
Always use OCR on PDFs	OCR every page, even those that already have text.

{
  "files": ["https://example.com/invoice.pdf", "https://example.com/screenshot.png"],
  "languages": ["en", "es"],
  "maxPagesPerPdf": 50
}

Output

One row per image or PDF page:

{
  "fileUrl": "https://example.com/scan.pdf",
  "fileType": "pdf",
  "page": 1,
  "pages": 4,
  "method": "ocr",
  "text": "The LinnSequencer\n32 Track MIDI Sequence Recorder\n\nThe LinnSequencer is a state-of-the-art composition...",
  "confidence": 94.6,
  "words": 729,
  "chars": 4310,
  "languages": ["eng", "deu", "spa"]
}

method is text-layer for digital PDF pages and ocr for images and scanned pages. confidence (0–100) is the average OCR confidence: above 85 is usually very clean.

Good to know

• Works best on clear, straight text (scans, screenshots, documents). Handwriting and very stylized fonts are harder.
• Files that can't be downloaded or opened are skipped (not charged) and listed in the FAILED_FILES record.
• OCR engine: Tesseract (Apache-2.0) with the tessdata_fast language models.

Integrations

Connect it to Google Drive, Dropbox, Make, Zapier or n8n to extract text from every new document automatically.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start) at the top of this page.
2. Fill in the input, or keep the example to see it working in seconds.
3. Click Start and wait for the run to finish.
4. Download the results as Excel, CSV, JSON or HTML, or get them through the Apify API.

How much does it cost?

$0.004 per page ($4.00 per 1,000). No start fee, no monthly fee, and you only pay for the results saved to your dataset.

Example	Cost
A 20-page scanned contract	about $0.08
1,000 invoices or receipts	about $4.00

Apify's free plan includes monthly credit, so you can try it for free.

FAQ

Which files can it read?

JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, BMP and GIF images, and PDFs, both digital and scanned.

Which languages are supported?

More than 100, including English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi and Russian. Several at once are fine.

Does it read scanned PDFs?

Yes. Pages with text are read directly; scanned pages go through OCR, and upside-down pages are turned automatically.

Can it read handwriting?

Clear print works best. Handwriting and very stylized fonts give lower accuracy.

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Support

Need tables, layout, or a specific language? Open an issue on the Issues tab.

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