12 Best Free OCR for Mac in The Year of 2022

Part 1. Best Free OCR Software for Mac 2022

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. 

1. PDF OCR X Community

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 for 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

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

3. OneNote OCR

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

4. OCR App by LEADTOOLS

OCR App by LEADTOOLS is a MacOS application designed to recognize and extract texts from images. Also it offers a set of tools to improve the OCR accuracy, such as tweak OCR Engine Settings, flip, reverse, adjust binarization or brightness of the image. It can also perform OCR on scanned PDFs, but only export files as text. If you want o convert uploaded files to other format with LEADTOOLS, you will need to copy and paste to the text processor accordingly.

Download Address: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/leadtools-ocr/id604393629?mt=12

5. Easy Screen OCR for Mac

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/

6. DigitEyeOCR

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

Part 2. Best Online Free OCR for 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.

7. Google Docs

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.

8. Online OCR

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 5MB) 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.

9. Online2PDF

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.

10. ConvertioOCR

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.

11. New OCR

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.

12. Free Online OCR

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.

What If Mac Free OCR Tools Not Working in Your Case?

However, these online/free mac OCR tools are not suitable for all mac users, you may feel not satisfied in one way or another:

1. There is a size limit of the files.
2. It doesn’t support various input or output format.
3. Risk of privacy leakages.
4. The tool doesn’t support your expected language.
5. The OCR result is not satisfied.
6. It is feature limited.

......

As we all know, “free” means you cannot get everything you desire from the service, if you require higher than those free services can offer, you will need to pay. This is also true to OCR services.

Best Solution If Mac Free OCR Software/Service Not Working

Choices on paid professional OCR software for Mac users are large in quantity. But if you are looking for the one combining 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：accurate OCR results and maintained original formatting.

 Cisdem PDF Converter OCR

Use Cisdem to OCR All Files Now

• Convert PDF to 16 formats;
• Create PDF from virtually all documents (40+ formats);
• OCR scanned documents and images into Word, Excel, PPT, Keynote, Pages, etc;
• Convert multiple PDFs to various document formats all at once.
• Convert any particular pages to boost your efficiency.
• High quality OCR and conversion results;

Free Download   Free Download

Steps to Perform OCR on Files with Cisdem

1. Add scanned PDF or image to Converter interface.
   Drag and drop, or click "+" to add files.
2. Turn the OCR button ON, choose page range, file language and output format.
3. Optional. Tweak the advanced OCR settings for more accurate results.
   Click the "Settings" icon, a new interface will appear. You will find all the contents are marked as Texts, Images or Tables in different colorful boxes. If you want to output a part as table, remove the current mark box, click on "Mark Tables" in the OCR applied zone, then drag a mark box to select the part you want to mark as Tables.
4. Click “Convert” to start OCR.

Conclusion

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 to OCR and convert files to a collection of file formats.