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How to Extract Text From an Image — Free OCR Guide

By DocFila Team · April 15, 2026 · 6 min read

Snapped a photo of a whiteboard, a textbook page, or a printed contract? OCR (Optical Character Recognition) lets you turn that image back into selectable, editable, searchable text. Here's how to do it with DocFila, without uploading the image to a website for most languages.

What OCR is — and why it's surprisingly hard

OCR engines look at the pixels of an image and try to identify each character, word, and line of text. Handwriting, rotated text, low contrast, and different scripts all make it harder. DocFila runs OCR on your device — Apple Vision on iOS and Google's ML Kit on Android — for Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Devanagari text. Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek have no on-device model: when the on-device pass finds nothing, a signed-in member can send the page to DocFila's AI service. Handwriting is read less reliably, so check the result.

Extract text from a photo with DocFila

1. Open DocFila and tap Scan or Import Photo.
2. Take a photo of the page or pick one from your library.
3. Tap Text → Extract.
4. Select the language(s) — you can pick multiple.
5. Tap any block to copy, edit, or send the extracted text to Notes, Mail, Translate, or DocFila's AI assistant.

Tips for the most accurate OCR

• Hold the phone flat and parallel to the page; use the scanner edge detection to auto-crop.
• Light the page evenly — strong shadows confuse OCR.
• For tiny text, scan in landscape mode for higher pixel density.
• Use B&W cleanup for printed text, but keep Color for handwriting or coloured highlights.

Extract text from screenshots and PDFs

The same OCR works on screenshots and image-based PDFs. Drop the file into DocFila → tap Run OCR → save as a searchable PDF or copy the text to clipboard. The PDF stays visually identical but every word becomes selectable and indexable.

Translate extracted text

After OCR, you can translate the text with DocFila's AI translator, which offers 47 target languages. Translation is cloud AI, so the text is sent to DocFila's AI service, and it is a premium tool with 5 free uses on the Free plan. To translate a whole file instead, see document translation.

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