Text Extract from Photo reads printed words out of pictures and hands them back as text you can actually use. Point the camera at a page, a sign or a label, or hand it a stack of photos you already took. Recognition happens on your phone: no account, and no picture is uploaded to us.
🗂️ A whole stack in one run
• Pick several photos and they are read in order, one after another
• A progress row per photo: waiting, reading, done, or skipped
• One unreadable photo never stops the batch — the rest still finish
• The results arrive as one combined text to copy, share or export
• The summary says how many were read and how many held nothing
🔊 Hear it read back
• Play, pause, stop, and a speed dial from slow to brisk
• Reading follows the recognised sentences, so you can look away
• Good for proofreading a label, or for anyone who prefers to listen
• No voice for your language? The app says so and opens the system voice installer instead of pretending to read
📤 Beyond the clipboard
• Save as a plain .txt file for any notes or documents app
• Save as a PDF you can keep, print or send on
• Files go out through the share sheet, so no storage permission is needed
📐 The layout survives
Line breaks and paragraphs come out as printed — an address stays an address, opening hours stay a list. Nothing is flattened into one blob. For receipts and two-column pages, switch on column order and each column is read top to bottom before the next begins.
📷 Camera or gallery
• Frame the text, tap the shutter, and the words appear in a second
• Already have the picture? Import it with the system photo picker
• A light toggle for dim rooms, a bag, or a shelf label in the shade
🧩 Blocks, not a wall of text
Text arrives split into blocks the way it was laid out. Tap one to pick it — the address, the phone number, the paragraph you wanted. Hold a block to take everything.
🔗 Numbers, emails and links
A phone number, email or web address becomes a chip. Tap it and the matching app opens. Nothing opens on its own — a scanned poster can never dial or browse for you.
🗃️ A history you control
Every extraction stays on this phone: search the full text, star what you return to, select several to copy, share or delete together, or clear the lot. Kept a photo with an entry? Read it again with a different script when a sign turns out not to be Latin. Turn history off and everything stored goes with it, photos included.
🌏 Latin, Korean, Japanese, Chinese
Latin covers English and most European languages and is on by default. Korean, Japanese and Chinese recognisers are included too — pick the one you photograph most. Each script is a separate model, which is why this app is a little larger than a note app; the settings screen says so plainly.
⚙️ Small things that help
• Optionally copy the first block as soon as text is read
• More than 30 interface languages, switchable in the app
• Dark, high-contrast layout, large buttons, a one-handed bottom bar
👋 Meet Quill
Quill, the little lens with a text cursor, greets you on the first run and explains why the camera is needed. While a photo is being read, Quill's eye tracks along the lines — it moves because work is happening, and stops when it is done.
🔒 Private by design
Recognition runs entirely on your device with Google ML Kit's on-device models. Photos and recognised text are not sent to our servers — we do not have any. The only Android permission asked for is the camera, and only when you use it. Importing pictures needs none.
✨ Free, with one optional upgrade
Everything above is free, supported by a small banner and an occasional full-screen ad. A one-time purchase removes ads forever; it is not a subscription.
Honest about the limits: printed text works well. Handwriting, heavily stylised lettering, low light and very small or blurred print may not come out cleanly. A PDF of non-Latin text is stored as page images, so use the .txt export when you need to select the words.
Recent changes:
Added a visible scrollbar on long lists; minor UI polish.
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