Umi-OCR — The Complete Guide: Free Offline OCR on Your Desktop, in Batches
Umi-OCR is an open-source desktop text recognition program that runs the PaddleOCR and RapidOCR engines on your own computer. No file is uploaded to a server, there is no sign-up, and the MIT licence allows commercial use as well. It runs on Windows, and on Linux through a separate runtime package.
Umi-OCR
hiroi-sora (Umi-OCR project)
Free open-source OCR program that works fully offline: screenshot OCR, batch OCR of images and PDF documents, and QR code reading.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Screenshot OCR — select a region of the screen and get the text in it.
- Batch processing — run a whole folder of images in one go.
- Scanned PDF documents — output as plain text or as a PDF with a searchable text layer.
- Cleaner results — merge lines into paragraphs and ignore watermarks and page headers.
- Automation — a command line and an HTTP API, plus QR code reading.
Who it suits — and what about Hebrew
The tool is excellent for turning an archive of English-language scans — data sheets, catalogues and old standards — into searchable text. The built-in engines are strongest in Chinese, English and Japanese, and Hebrew is not supported. For Hebrew documents, use an engine that handles it, such as Tesseract.
Related tools
For a classic OCR engine with many language packs — Tesseract. For a friendly graphical front end on top of it — gImageReader. For adding a text layer to PDFs in batches — OCRmyPDF.
Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR project
The open OCR engine behind many tools — turns scans into text in more than 100 languages.
Get it from the vendor
gImageReader
gImageReader project
Graphical OCR built on Tesseract — turn scanned pages and PDFs into text or a searchable PDF.
Get it from the vendor
OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF project
Adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs — old reports, standards and drawings become searchable.
Get it from the vendor
PaddleOCR
PaddlePaddle (Baidu)
Open-source Python OCR and document parsing toolkit: text recognition in dozens of languages, page layout, tables and PDF to Markdown or JSON.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
If your documents are in English and you want local OCR with a graphical interface and batch mode, Umi-OCR is one of the most convenient free options. For Hebrew, look elsewhere.