Free OCR Software to Extract Text from Images

Sometimes we need to get the text out of photos or scanned documents. There you can use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software which are available for free to download to extract the text from images or photos taken from digital cameras or Smartphones. There are lot many small software available for this purpose.

Here are some popular OCR software available for free.

1. FreeOCR.net

 This free OCR software is available to download on Softpedia. Size of the software is 156 KB. You can install this software on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 operating systems. Go ahead and install this software to extract text from images, scanned documents. Use this OCR software on pictures taken from 3 Mega Pixel or better resolution camera. This software requires Microsoft .net installation.Download FreeOCR

2. SimpleOCR

It is a free to download OCR software available on web. If you are having a scanner or All in one printer, then you can just scan a copy and use SimpleOCR to extract text out of the scanned document. Then just print the text only. SimpleOCr is a freeware and expected to remain available for free in future as well.
Download SimpleOCR

Windows OS users can also install Microsoft Office  OneNote and use “Copy text from picture” option to get text out of images. You just need to open a scanned document or picture in one note and right click on the image to get the option to copy text.

Mac OS users are having very limited options in freely available OCR software. Some of the popular OCR software for Mac are ABBYY FineReader and OmniPage Pro X.