Read the text off a photograph

Japanese, English, Chinese or Vietnamese. You get the words as text you can copy, search, or paste into a dictionary — which is hard to do with a photograph, and impossible if you cannot yet type the characters you are looking at.

This one is different from the other tools, and you should know how. The picture is sent to our machine, because reading Japanese needs a real reader and the browser version of one is a ten-megabyte download. It is written, read, and deleted inside the same request — no order, no account, no record kept, not even of what it said. If the reader fails, it is still deleted. What we keep is a single number: that somebody used the reader today.

If you would rather nothing left your phone at all, the photo tool and the PDF tools never send anything anywhere.

If it comes out wrong

A reader does much better on a flat, bright photograph with the page filling the frame than on one taken at an angle across a table. Cropping and lifting the contrast first usually fixes it, and that part runs in your browser.