Best OCR Online Programs

OCR has been made available online as a service (WebOCR), in a cloud computing environment, and in mobile applications like real-time translation of foreign-language signs on a smartphone.

Best Choice: Free-OCR

Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR program. You can use this service to extract text from any image you supply. This service is free, no registration necessary. It does not need your email address. Just upload your image files. Free-OCR takes either a JPG, GIF, TIFF BMP or PDF (only first page).

The only restriction is that the images must not be larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour.

The figure below shows origin image and text that free-ocr.com exports. Click the figure to enlarge it. The conversion result is good.

You can access Free-OCR at http://www.free-ocr.com

Optional: Online OCR

Extract text from image (JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF) and convert into editable Word, Text, Excel, PDF, Html output formats. Converted documents look exactly like the original - tables, columns and graphics.

OnlineOCR.net is a free service in a "Guest mode" (without registration) that allows you to convert 15 images per hour.

The figure below shows origin image and text that OnlineOCR exports. Click the figure to enlarge it. The conversion result is not as good as we expected. It throws an error message "Server Error in / Application." when I click the "Download Output File" button.

You can access Online OCR at http://www.onlineocr.net