Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Extract Text from Images Online with Free Online OCR


Free OCR is a web-based application dedicated to extract text from any supported images, including JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP or PNG. Additionally, it also supports PDF file and can recognize up to 6 languages from English, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch.

Free OCR is free and doesn’t require anything from you, not even your email address, but you’ll have to make sure that the uploaded image isn’t more than 2MB in size. It must also not higher or wider than 5000 pixels. Another limitation is that you can only upload 10 images per hour.

Another thing to note is that the extracted text will be presented as a plain text only. The formatting and layout of the text will not be included. Additionally, the application requires the resolution of the images to be at least 150 dpi, so it might fail to exract text from a screenshot in case you’re planning to. But it is said that you should give it a shot to find out if it can recognize and extract text from the screenshot image that you have.

“Our OCR engine requires images at a resolution of 150 dpi or greater and as such it is not optimal suited for reading PC screen shots which are only 72dpi. But as we process your uploaded image for better accuracy it might be possible to OCR even screen shots. just give it a try.”

If you’re going to extract text from your pdf file that contains several pages, I suggest to refrain from using this online service at this moment since it only extract text from the first page of your pdf file.

Link: http://www.free-ocr.com/

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