# Is there an OCR app? — DocFind

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026. HTML version: https://docfindapp.com/answers/is-there-an-ocr-app

**Yes — and your phone probably already has some of it built in.** The more useful question is which of three quite different jobs you mean, because the apps that do them well are not the same apps.

## The three kinds

- **Grab text off something in front of you.** A sign, a receipt, a page in a book. This is built into modern phones. Apple documents it on iPhone: open a photo, "Touch and hold a word and move the grab points to adjust the selection", then "Tap Copy" ([*Copy and translate text from photos — Apple Support*](https://support.apple.com/en-us/120004), read 23 September 2026).
- **Turn paper into a document.** A scanner app that straightens the page and saves it. On iPhone this is in Notes: in a note, tap the Attachments button, "then tap Scan Documents", and Apple's page states the outcome — "The document is saved as a PDF in the note" ([*Scan text and documents in Notes using the iPhone camera*](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/scan-text-and-documents-iph653f28965/ios), read 23 September 2026).
- **Make documents you already have searchable.** Dozens or hundreds of PDFs, some of them scans, and a question you need answered across all of them. This is the one the built-in tools do not cover, because they work on one thing at a time.

## Three questions worth asking before installing one

- **Does it run on the device, or upload?** Some OCR apps send your page to a server. For a menu that is fine; for a payslip, a medical letter or a contract it is a copy of your document on someone else's machine. Find out before you install, not after.
- **What does it do with the result?** Copying text to the clipboard and making a library searchable are different products. If you want the second, the first will frustrate you.
- **What does it admit it cannot do?** An OCR tool that claims perfect results on anything has told you something useful about the vendor rather than about the software.

## What none of them do well

Handwriting is a gamble with any of them. Faint photocopies, stamped-over text, tightly-set tables and columns read in the wrong order all produce output that looks plausible and is subtly wrong. And a misread word is worse than a missed one: it stores the wrong text, so a search for the correct spelling quietly returns nothing. [The full honest version.](https://docfindapp.com/answers/does-ocr-work-on-handwriting)

## Where DocFind fits

[DocFind](https://docfindapp.com/) is the third kind. It indexes many PDFs together and searches them at once: results show the file, the page and the surrounding text, and tapping one opens that PDF at that page with your keywords highlighted. Scanned documents are read on your device first — Apple's Vision on iPhone, a bundled recognition model on Android that works in airplane mode — and then searched like any other document.

What it tells you about its own limits is part of the design. Matches that came from reading a scanned page are labelled as such, pages it could not make searchable are reported, and a file it could not open is named with the reason. It matches the words you type rather than guessing related ones. On the free tier: one library of up to 25 documents, 10 scanned pages and 10 exports every month, unlimited keywords and unlimited results.

Related: [What is OCR?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/what-is-ocr) · [How to OCR on iPhone](https://docfindapp.com/answers/ocr-on-iphone) · [Make a scanned PDF searchable](https://docfindapp.com/answers/make-a-scanned-pdf-searchable) · [Does OCR work on handwriting?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/does-ocr-work-on-handwriting)