TextGrabber scan and translate Reviews

by WildBillWillie

Horrible. Tried several trials with and without graphics in the background, and either didn't even detect the language, in which it didn't even try to attempt OCR. Or on the rare occasion would try but would totally foul up the sentences and words. Best stick to the free Google Translate app which works brilliant in comparison to this one with real time video translate, or pictures that have already been taken in your Photos app as well. It easily picks up Cyrillic and other languages. ABBY just gouges. Good luck to the developer. Perhaps use some of the better open source OCR software available and add useful features that other apps don't already have.

by Sam Winston Hawk

Such high ratings for an app that constantly either not doing what it’s suppose to. OCR feature need work more text recognition...I could really do without all those symbol @&$”#%*€£¥> when it’s done scanning. It is annoying, very annoying. The paid finish product is very disappointing. Also, I’d like the developer to include Lao and Thai language in the translation feature. If I had known that Thai and Lao language translation was not included, I would not had bought it because it’s practically useless to me. How do I request for a refund in that regard?

Edit: I just check again, there is no Thai or Lao language option for the translation feature? If there is it certainly isn’t on mine. How do I get it?

by PhelineCat

I had a very simple thing to scan but not even translate and it worked great. There was a little glitch with the letter "u" (which nowhere spells the word "you" unless you want your [please, don't grunt "ur"]writing to appear to be regressing toward primitive humanity) but that's common with photo to text apps. I have no idea what the rent actually is … I don't know why developers think we enjoy being screwed by them and not even being clear what it will cost.

by CeltieLG

One of my favorite apps I recommend to others. Especially helpful for research or capturing interesting info when you run into it (like at a museum or household tips). Lost a star only because it too often puts in strange intęrnætîönål letters that should be filtered out when the majority of text is obviously English. I dislike correcting those; takes too much time. Just needs some logarithm tweaking. 👍

by Kevinpleong

Text grabber is an amazing app because I am able to use it whenever and I can convert the photos that I took and extract the text from the photo. I have been looking for an app like this for a long time and finally found it. I will say if I want to look through my files and convert them sometimes it won’t let me go to the page to convert them.

by Eddie#9#9

TextGrabberscanandtranslate works pretty well. However while using it to OCR recipes, I found a couple of things it does stumble on. First, it often converts lower-case L to a forward slash “/“. Second, fractions consisting of two numbers separated by a slash, e.g. “1/4”, are often converted to garbage. This problem is worse when reading a stylized fraction where the first number sits above the second number - that is, the 2 numbers do not share a baseline.

by Statsoul

I have been in Germany for the last few years. This application has been extremely useful. I have been able to translate everything written communication I get in German into English. The application is not perfect but it does the trick. I can read menu's, adds, shopping information, food labels and many other things on the spot. There is still room for improvement but I better deal with the 10% opportunity than with 100% ignorance. Bottom line, it is a great application worth having.

by Anomalogue

The OCR technology is good. But software is more than technology, snd this is where this software falls short. It is difficult to get it to work. For instance, how do you export a whole scan to evernote? Who even knows? It exports a random excerpt? And why is translation always offered as the most prominent next step? And once you figure out how it is supposed to work they change it around so you have to relearn it. ABBYY desperately needs design help.

by DudemanLA

Glad I purchased this
Sometimes when I want to select text on my iPhone I can't because it's not selectable
That's where this application comes in
I take a screenshot of it then I accessed the photo in this up and crop it and then TextGrabberscanandtranslate will OCR it and I will copy the text and paste it somewhere else.
It works great 😎👍🏻

by @srdvx

So many scanner apps promise test digitalization or OCR, yet when it comes to it, a simple extracting of a telephone number from the bank transaction (charge description) becomes more work and steps than one would care to perform or remember. TextGrabberscanandtranslate takes care of that and even remembers the results, without the need to bother with saving files.
Ability to specify TextGrabberscanandtranslate as a target for sharing in the helper menu is a key feature, not to minimize how well TextGrabberscanandtranslate is made to handle all various OCR situations and text translation to/from 100 languages, even language detection, which is major, when you really need it, like to translate a message in a global chat.
Best app.

by Cacapoopy

Have a screenshot with the serial number or tracking number that you need? On mobile comes in handy quite often. It’s difficult to toggle back-and-forth between applications and grab chunks of numbers and letters. Just take a screenshot and feed it to this application and then copy and paste away.

by Cb4ujudge

If you want a great application to capture text, whether it’s from a book, a document, or an article in a magazine, etc. this is the go-to app I would recommend. It’s not perfect - some text is incorrectly recognized, however, that is usually the fault of the lighting of the document being scanned. If you evenly light the image that you’re scanning before doing a scan you’ll have great results, although a couple of words may be incorrectly recognized. Minor effort is required to edit them before saving the documents or emailing them.

My only gripe is that when combining multiple scanned pages, they are combined in a non-intuitive order. It would be nice if you could somehow number each page that was scanned in the order that you want them combined. Maybe this could be fixed in a future release!

by Nitinthewiz

I’ve tried quite a few text recognition apps and I must say TextGrabber is the best. It’s so simple and elegant and gets 99% of the things right. The remaining 1%? Did you hold the page just wrong, or with a bend on the book page? Or perhaps with just enough low light? I’ve made all those mistakes and when I fix them, TextGrabberscanandtranslate gives me a 100% perfect OCR.

by An ITouch4 User

I need it to take notes from books, not translate, and it works very well for that. Don't try to do the whole page at once... thirds or half work best. It's fast, requires a few corrections, but I'm studying so am willing to re-read and correct. Very satisfied.
Months later: Now it's been "improved" and nothing works! Absolutely frustrating!

by Leee123lgee

I cannot get over how amazing this is. I had no idea this exists and very easy to use too. Who ever developed this, you have no idea how you made my life so much easier. Thank you.

I am an Operating room nurse and doctors have preference cards. Sometimes they just come to me with an old print of their list or someone's list and I always wished I have a way to easily transfer them and edit them from my phone. This is a dream come true. THANK YOU!!

by Guate Red Raider

Love TextGrabberscanandtranslate. But there are a couple of things…
1. About two weeks ago, the feature of scanning an image directly from Photo quit working. Now I must go to TextGrabberscanandtranslate first, get rid of the startup screen which informs me that I can go to Photo and share, and pull the image into TextGrabberscanandtranslate that way.
2. Would be nice to have Spanish from Latin America language, not just Spanish from Spain.

by D_or 2000

Very handy. Text recognition is good/excellent
My suggestion: It doesn't correct parallax of a scanned page. If you take the picture of a book there will be a distortion due to the page curve. It seems this causes issues with the OCR. Since we know that a lign should be straight, the software should be able to correct the parallax and correct distortion at the beginning and end of the lines. This, I assume, would improve the OCR of the scanned page.
Anyway, great app

by BestAppsUser

I’ve used TextGrabberscanandtranslate for a long while and I’ve been quiet about it, because it WORKS! Even when I give it a grainy pic.

Recently took the iOS13 upgrade and was kindly asked to rate it. Sorry for waiting so long but rest assured I have recommended TextGrabberscanandtranslate to many of my colleagues and friends over the years, primarily in the technical field. Hopefully they will add to the accolades and review it ALLSTARS as well. Keep up the good works.

Btw: When a file export or save fails in other apps. I say “screw it” I got TextGrabber and they get the NOStars.

by MhoneyJ

I’m testing TextGrabberscanandtranslate and it’s pretty accurate for recognizing English, which I really need it at this moment. However, there are a few things that doesn’t accurately. First, TextGrabberscanandtranslate couldn’t recognize the words lie on the distortion of the photo during the photo taking process. Second, online translation into Vietnamse which has 20% vocabulary that could not be translated, and the translation is pretty wild (not smooth translation). Please take a look into those points. But in general, I am much appreciated how it works right now.

by Jsl2749

I am quite pleased with this and it's nice if you want to look up a question on a worksheet for help but don't want to type it out yourself.

The reading of the words is actually pretty accurate (as long as you hold the camera straight). It used to be more sensitive, but they have updated TextGrabberscanandtranslate to be more precise and effective.

Great app and completely worth downloading. This is a must-have.

by Capedape

Please think about adding ability to replace replace/all in text that has been captured. Or a list of word/sentences to never render into ocr’d text. I’d pay for this as an in app purchase!

1: please add more flexibility. Like ios share sheet extension access to send to textgrabber. Ability to take screenshot in iOS 11 and immediately send to textgrabber by clicking on the screenshot thumbnail. Ability to edit straight in textgrabber from where a photo is full screen opened from camera roll eg three little dots within circle ...

2: The latest ipads and phones are quite powerful. Looking forward to TextGrabberscanandtranslate , hopefully this one, that let’s me upload a OCR pdf and automatically snapshot all the pages into editable text. That will be the holy grail and I’d surely pay for the update or in app purchase.

by @srgdvd

So many scanner apps promise test digitalization or OCR, yet when it comes to it, a simple extracting of a telephone number from the bank transaction (charge description) becomes more work and steps than one would care to perform or remember. TextGrabberscanandtranslate takes care of that and even remembers the results, without the need to bother with saving files.
Ability to specify TextGrabberscanandtranslate as a target for sharing in the helper menu is a key feature, not to minimize how well TextGrabberscanandtranslate is made to handle all various OCR situations and text translation to/from 100 languages, even language detection, which is major, when you really need it, like to translate a message in a global chat.
Best app.

by John615

This is a wonderful app! The only thing that would help a bunch would be an Action Extension so I could send images directly to it rather than saving them, opening TextGrabberscanandtranslate , and then pulling them in.
An extensive URL scheme would also be fantastic, but that would just be for the advanced users.
Thank you!