Image OCR Text Extractor: text from image URLs, per line

Text from images by URL, up to 200 per run: every line with its confidence and position, the full text joined, image size and format, for screenshots, scans, receipts, menus and product labels, without a browser or an API key. Pay per image with text.

Why this scraper

• Only delivered results are charged. Inputs that fail come back as clear error records at no cost.
• Open-source OCR (PaddleOCR models on onnxruntime) inside the actor, so no external API, no key and no per-call vendor fee: a 640 by 480 screenshot reads in about two seconds. Measured on the platform: eight lines at 0.98 confidence for seven hundredths of a cent.
• Every line separately with its confidence and its box (x, y, width, height), plus the full text joined in reading order, the image size and format. Lines under the confidence you set are dropped, so noisy backgrounds do not produce garbage rows. Every URL is checked against its host's robots.txt first; an image without readable text is a free error row, not an empty paid one.

Who this is for

Paste image URLs in urls (up to 200 per run; PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF) and set minConfidence (default 0.5). Every row carries the URL, the full text, the lines, the line count, the average confidence, the boxes, the image width and height, the format, the file size and the OCR time.

Who this is not for

This is OCR, not vision: printed and clean screen text reads reliably, handwriting, tiny text, heavy skew or low contrast read poorly or not at all, and the confidence column tells you which lines to trust. The models cover Latin scripts and Chinese; other scripts are not supported. Images longer than 4,000 pixels on a side are scaled down before reading; files above 20 MB are refused for free. Reading order is top to bottom, then left to right, which can interleave columns in multi-column layouts.

Input example

{
    "urls": [
        "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/madmaze/pytesseract/master/tests/data/test.png"
    ],
    "minConfidence": "0.5"
}

Output example

• url
• text
• lines
• lineCount
• avgConfidence
• boxes
• width
• height
• format
• fileBytes
• processedMs

Error codes: INVALID_URL, ROBOTS_DISALLOWED, NOT_AN_IMAGE, TOO_LARGE, NO_TEXT, FETCH_FAILED, BLOCKED.

One delivered row looks like this:

{
  "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/madmaze/pytesseract/master/tests/data/test.png",
  "text": "This is a lot of 12 point text to test the\nocr code and see if it works on all types\nof file format.\nThe quick brown dog jumped over the\nlazy fox. The quick bro...",
  "lines": [
    "This is a lot of 12 point text to test the",
    "ocr code and see if it works on all types",
    "of file format.",
    "The quick brown dog jumped over the",
    "lazy fox. The quick brown dog jumped",
    "over the lazy fox. The quick brown dog",
    "jumped over the lazy fox. The quick",
    "brown dog jumped over the lazy fox."
  ],
  "lineCount": 8,
  "avgConfidence": 0.984,
  "boxes": [
    "36,90,546,30 0.967",
    "34,123,584,33 0.994",
    "37,160,189,26 0.972",
    "34,190,553,36 0.999",
    "33,225,555,34 0.981",
    "34,260,565,33 0.984",
    "41,293,523,34 0.992",
    "35,329,528,32 0.986"
  ],
  "width": 640,
  "height": 480,
  "format": "PNG",
  "fileBytes": 11513,
  "processedMs": 4251,
  "status": "ok"
}

Related actors from steadydata

• pdf-text-extractor: the same for PDF files with a text layer
• webpage-to-markdown: the text of web pages without OCR
• google-images: find the images to read

Pricing

Pay per event: one image-read event per delivered result. No charge for inputs that fail, no separate platform-usage surcharge.

Free Apify plan: this actor delivers up to 25 rows per run for accounts on the Apify free plan, and then stops with a message. That limit is set by us, not by Apify. It exists so the actor keeps paying for itself for the people who do pay. Any paid Apify plan runs it at full size, billed per delivered row, with failed rows never charged.

Reviews: if this actor saves you time, a short review on this page is the one thing that helps most. Ratings are what other buyers look at first, and we have no other way to ask.

FAQ

Does it read receipts and invoices? Yes, printed ones read well; use the boxes to keep amounts next to their labels.

Can I OCR a PDF? Not here; the PDF Text Extractor below reads PDFs with a text layer. A scanned PDF needs its pages exported as images first.

Which languages? Latin-script languages (English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and so on) and Chinese. Cyrillic, Arabic and Asian scripts other than Chinese are not supported.

Is my image sent to a third party? No. The OCR runs inside the actor; nothing leaves Apify.

Do I pay for an image without text? No. Only images delivered with text are charged.

Is personal data collected? boxes entries read x,y,width,height confidence in pixels of the original image; avgConfidence is the mean over the delivered lines; processedMs is the OCR time only.

What happens when the source changes? Sources change from time to time; that is the nature of this work. The actor is monitored daily and fixed fast, and while it is broken you are not charged, because only delivered results cost anything.