How do I OCR on iPhone?

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026 · Markdown version

An iPhone reads text out of images without any app installed, and most people never touch the feature. There are three separate built-in routes, they do different jobs, and Apple documents each of them.

1. Copy text out of a photo

Apple Support's steps: "Open the Photos app and select a photo or video, or select an image online. Touch and hold a word and move the grab points to adjust the selection. If the text is in a video, pause the video first. Tap Copy."

The same page gives the requirement — "you need an iPhone XS, iPhone XR, or later with iOS 15 or later" — and adds translation on top: "Tap the Live Text button. Tap Translate". Live Text in video needs "iOS 16 or later". Apple does not list the supported languages on that page; it links out to a separate list of "which regions and languages currently support Live Text", which is worth checking before relying on it for a language other than your own (Copy and translate text from photos — Apple Support, read 23 September 2026).

2. Read text straight from the camera

The same recognition works before anything is saved. Apple's wording: "You can also use Live Text in the Camera app or when using Camera in apps like Notes or Reminders — point your camera at a photo or image with text, then tap the Live Text button" (Copy and translate text from photos — Apple Support, read 23 September 2026). Useful for a serial number, a wifi password on a router, or an address — anything you want once and do not want to keep.

3. Scan a document into a PDF

Apple's Notes guide gives it as: in a note, tap the Attachments button, "then tap Scan Documents. Position your iPhone so that the document page appears on the screen", with automatic capture if you "Keep your iPhone steady" — "Your iPhone automatically captures the document when it detects the page boundaries". The outcome, in Apple's words: "The document is saved as a PDF in the note."

Notes also offers Scan Text: "In supported languages, you can insert scanned text using the camera" — you select the text and tap Insert, so the note gets editable words rather than a page image. That is the right one when you want the words rather than the document (Scan text and documents in Notes using the iPhone camera, read 23 September 2026).

What all three leave undone

Every one of them works on the thing in front of you, now. None of them answers the question that comes later: which of my ninety documents mentions this, and on what page. The built-in tools are per-item; the problem is per-library.

It is also worth knowing what recognition does badly, on any device: handwriting is hit and miss, faint photocopies and stamped-over text stay hard, and a misread stores the wrong word — so a search for the right spelling silently misses it. The honest version.

Where DocFind fits

DocFind covers the per-library job. It indexes many PDFs and searches them together: results show the file, the page and the surrounding text, and tapping one opens that PDF at that exact page with your keywords highlighted. Scanned PDFs are read on the phone using Apple's own Vision text recognition, entirely on your device, and then searched like any other document — with matches from that reading labelled, and pages it could not make searchable reported rather than quietly dropped.

Free tier: one library of up to 25 documents, 10 scanned pages and 10 exports every month, with unlimited keywords and unlimited results. Searching, indexing and reading scanned pages all work with no internet connection, and your documents never leave your device.