When converting scanned invoices, reports or images into editable formats, OCR is required. If you are looking for the best free OCR solutions for Mac, we collect a list for you: a list of 12 powerful Mac free ocr software or online free OCR services, which have been proved to be excellent in the last year 2024 and will continue their good reputation in this year 2025.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
There are 2 types of free OCR solutions for Mac users, either online or offline. First we will list 6 best free OCR software for Mac, for the reason that standalone OCR software generally has better OCR results than those online ones, and they have less limitations.
With the release of macOS Monterey, Shortcuts arrived on Mac. Compared to iPhone and iPad, Mac provides more productivity features. With shortcuts users get a simple way to complete multiple tasks or execute complex functions at a time. For instance, you can use the "Image to Text" shortcuts to easily OCR and extract text from images in the Photos app.
Here is how you can build and use the OCR Shortcuts on Mac
Here’s how to use it:
Open the terminal and input the following command:
shortcuts run ocr-text
Then it will extract text from the latest image in your photos library and copy it to your clipboard, you just need to paste the text to notes or any other text editor you use.
PDF OCR X Community is a simple drag-and-drop utility that converts single-page PDFs and images into text documents or searchable PDF files, it supports more than 60 languages. For multi-page PDFs and batch conversion features, you need to pay its enterprise version.
Download Address: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pdf-ocr-x-community-edition/id571442933?mt=12
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Evernote is a popular note-syncing service, enables users to collect, nuture and share ideas across desktop and mobile platforms. One of its easily overlooked features is automatic OCR service. Users will be allowed to add images into Evernote server for automatic OCR, you may have to wait, but 10 minutes will be quite enough to finish the OCR.
Download Address: https://evernote.com/download
Evernote is one of the best and most popular cross-platform note-taking apps. In this article, you will find how to use Evernote OCR and what to do if Evernote OCR is not working.
READ MORE >Microsoft OneNote is a program to take and manage notes anytime and anywhere. It greatly facilitates the collaborations between team members. Not only limited to manually input texts to create notes, Microsoft OneNote also embeds the OCR feature, OneNote OCR allowing users to recognize texts from images, so the image texts can be copied and paste as editable or searchable note.
Download Address: https://www.onenote.com/download
An impressive feature of OneNote is its built-in capability to do OneNote OCR. Here we are going to introduce OneNote OCR, demonstrate how to OCR image or PDF with OneNote.
READ MORE >It is a light and simple Mac free OCR software to recognize texts from images. All you need to do is, capturing the screenshots of your file first, then performing OCR on the file to make the image text copyable. Also, it allows users to save the screenshot as PNG or PDF format. However, this free OCR software for Mac only allows users to OCR 20 images for free.
Download Address: https://easyscreenocr.com/
Though DigitEyeOCR has discontinued to update for many years, for users who are using MacOS 10.10 and earlier, it is still worth a try. It is a free OCR software for mac to recognize texts from BMP and GIF images. If you want to do OCR on other image formats, you will need to convert the file to DigitEye OCR supported formats.
Download Address: https://digiteyeocr.en.softonic.com/mac
Also, there are quite a lot of online free OCR services for mac users, but not all of them can actually perform OCR or bring satisfactory OCR results. And here we pick 6 best free OCR tools online according to our OCR testing.
Google Docs is a service offered by Google to manage web-based documents, like creating, editing Word, Spreadsheets, presentations, even store them online for easy access on different devices. Users can perform Google OCR on images, scanned PDFs, it is fast with basically satisfactory results.
Online OCR is an online OCR service that can recognize the texts and characters from scanned files and images. It requires no software installation, what you need to do is upload the file (not exceeding size of 15MB) as guided, choose the language and output format(Word, Excel or Text), then "Convert" to start the OCR process. Once finish, a download link will be offered to download the converted file.
Online2PDF is another online platform to manage PDF files, such as editing, compressing, unlocking, converting, merging, protecting and so on. Comparing with other online free OCR tools, Online2pdf offers extended features to customize the output and support more output formats.
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Convertio is an online free tool to OCR image and scanned documents, then save them as various editable formats. You can upload files from local or via url, even icloud storage accounts. It allows users to perform OCR on a multiple-language file.
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New OCR can convert JPG, PNG, GIF, MBP, TIFF, PDF and DJVU files into Doc, TXT or PDF format. To improve the OCR accuracy, New OCR allows users to rotate images and analyze page layout before the OCR processing. If you want to export the files as other formats, you need to click the “Download” button at the bottom of its page to export.
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Free Online OCR is a free service enabling users to convert images, scanned PDFs into editable and searchable text, such as DOC, RTF, TXT or PDF. It will rotate the pages automatically for accurate OCR, you can get editable files with nice formatting.
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| Input | Output | Chief drawbacks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Mac OCR Shortcuts | Images | Text | No formatting is retained, only text |
| 2. PDF OCR X Community | PDF and Image | PDF, Text | OCR single-page PDF, formatting is messed up when working on complicate files |
| PDF and Image | Text, Image | Limited OCR feature | |
| 4. OneNote OCR | PDF and Image | Text | Only copy text from picture without format |
| 5. Easy Screen OCR for Mac | Screenshot | Text | No formatting is retained |
| 6. DigitEyeOCR | BMP and GIF | Text | Workable on macOS 10.10 and earlier |
| 7. Google Docs | PDF and Image | PDF, Word, ODT, RTF, Text, HTML, ePub | Unstable OCR accuracy |
| PDF and Image | Word, Excel, Text | Max file size limit 15 MB, medium OCR accuracy | |
| PDF and Image | Word, Excel, PPT, Text, ePub, HTML, etc. | File quantity and size limit, medium OCR accuracy | |
| PDF and Image | Word, Excel, Text, ePub, PPT, DjVu, etc. | Only 10 pages can be done with OCR for free | |
| PDF, Image and DjVu | PDF, Word, Text | OCR failure, medium OCR accuracy | |
| PDF and Image | PDF, Word, Text, RTF | Medium OCR accuracy |
“Free OCR” means you cannot get everything you desire from the service, there are limitations: poor OCR accuracy, limited file size and quantity, risk of privacy leak, output text file only, don’t support your languages, etc. They may not work in your case, then you’d better find a professional and accurate Mac OCR tool.
Choices on paid professional OCR software for Mac users are large in quantity. But if you are looking for the one solution that combines simplicity, versatility and affordability, Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is absolutely the best choice.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is a dedicated Mac OCR software to convert and create PDF, also perform OCR on scanned documents or images to make them editable & searchable. One thing makes Cisdem outperform its competitors is its high quality OCR performance:
Main Features of Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
Yes, Mac has a free OCR capability now.
Since iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, Apple has built in the Live Text feature to look up, translate, copy and share texts in an image-based file that saved in JPG, PNG, BMP, PDF and so on. It applies OCR on the image, turning the scanned texts to Mac-readable texts. It is easy to use, but you can copy the texts only, you won’t be able to keep the original formatting when pasting the recognized texts to your documents.
In most cases, we will start with free OCR on Mac, which can perform OCR on simple files and get us copies of searchable texts, but no free OCR tool is accurate enough to recognize contents from scans or images. A dedicated OCR program is more helpful and reliable to OCR simple and complicate files, moreover, they let users OCR and convert files to a collection of file formats.
Carolyn has always been passionate about reading and writing, so she joined Cisdem as an editor as soon as she graduated from university. She focuses on writing how-to articles about PDF editing and conversion.
jndesign
I do need Tibetan Ocr, but u don't have. newocr has tibetan but only do 1 page. really need ur help, please add tibetan language! thank u so so much!
Johnny Damon
I personnaly try Microsoft One Note OCR, It's very good and it provide all featues that are availave in paid verson. Nice List you share. it will helpful. Thanks.
mali
Really useful list, the pros&cons help me decide which one is better for me.
Jones
Free but feature-limited,I understand. But still useful.
Jenny
Google Docs is really great, i didn't notice that it has the OCR feature. Though the recognition is not that accurate as the paid ones, it is convenient.
marcus
I am looking for free tools to do the OCR. If they are not doing good, I think i will be convinced to try the OCR Wizard, it can export to more than 12 editable formats, that's really a great bonus.