Notes apps with OCR: which ones can search your photos, PDFs and handwriting

Search your notes for “furnace” and most apps will find the notes where you typed it. They won’t find the photo of the warranty sticker, the invoice the installer emailed you, or the page where he wrote down the model number.

Finding those is OCR’s job. The app reads the words in an image or a scanned page, so search can find them later. Evernote made that feel normal years ago. Plenty of notes apps still don’t do it, and the ones that do disagree about what counts. Photos but not PDFs. PDFs, but only on a paid plan. Handwriting on one device and not on another.

So we checked 16 of them, on each company’s own pages, on November 6, 2026.

A word about us first. We make Harbor, a notes app, and it’s in this post. We’ll say so again when we get there.

The short version

• Photos, PDFs and handwriting in a photo, on every plan: Evernote and Harbor (ours). Evernote’s free plan stops at 50 notes.
• Free, if you’re all-Apple: Apple Notes searches its scans and what you write with an Apple Pencil, on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
• Strongest on Windows: OneNote searches pictures in its Windows app, and copies text out of them on Windows and Mac.
• Photos only, in English: Google Keep. It can’t hold PDFs.
• On the paid plan: Bear Pro ($29.99 a year) and Zoho Notebook Pro ($19.99 a year).
• Free, on your own computer: Joplin. Printed text only, and the reading happens on desktop.
• Your pen, not your photos: Goodnotes and Notability search what you write in them.
• No OCR: Notion, Obsidian (plugins only), Craft, UpNote, Notesnook, Standard Notes and Simplenote.

Which notes apps have OCR

Checked against each company’s own pages on November 6, 2026. Prices are US. “Not stated” means the company doesn’t say either way, so we won’t guess.

Two things stand out. Evernote is still the one to beat, and it’s more generous than it used to be: image and document search is now on the free plan. And several of the apps people move to from Evernote, Notion and Obsidian among them, can’t do it at all. If you’re leaving Evernote with a library of scans, that’s the column to read first in the best Evernote alternatives.

App by app

Evernote

Yes, on every plan, Free included. Evernote finds text “including handwritten text” inside images, reads printed and handwritten text in PDFs, and searches inside Microsoft Office files too. Matches inside images and PDFs are highlighted when you open the note. Searching inside documents used to be a paid feature. Now the free plan lists “image and document search,” but Free stops at 50 notes and one notebook. Starter is $99 a year for up to 1,000 notes, and Advanced is $249.99.

Two limits from its help center. A PDF over 52 MB isn’t processed for search. And if your office scanner runs its own OCR, the hidden text it adds can stop Evernote from searching the page at all. Evernote’s fix is to scan to “PDF (Image Only).” We looked at whether the rest of Evernote is worth the money in is Evernote worth it?

Apple Notes

Yes, free, on Apple devices. Notes searches “text in a scanned document” and PDFs you’ve attached, and its App Store page says search finds words “inside scanned documents and photos like receipts or bills.” What you write with your finger or an Apple Pencil is searchable in supported languages, and an iPad can turn it into typed text as you write. Live Text copies words out of a photo. The scanner is on iPhone and iPad. A Mac borrows a nearby iPhone’s camera.

The catch is the platform. There’s no app for Windows or Android, and Apple’s guide to Notes on iCloud.com doesn’t mention searching inside scans. More in Evernote vs Apple Notes.

OneNote

Yes on Windows. Elsewhere, Microsoft’s docs are thin. OneNote for Windows searches “text, handwriting, images” in your notebooks, though Microsoft says some results can take “up to 24-48 hours” to show up. Right-click a picture and Copy Text from Picture copies what it read, on Windows and on a Mac. Microsoft says that’s “not possible in OneNote for the web.” On a Mac the reading happens on Microsoft’s servers, and Microsoft warns that “handwritten or highly stylized or script-like text will not work very well.”

What you write with a pen is searchable, and Ink to Text turns it into typed text, except on the web. OneNote is free. One date to know: the old OneNote for Windows 10 app went read-only on October 14, 2025, so if you still use it, move to the current OneNote app.

Google Keep

Yes for photos, in English. Keep’s help says you can “search for text in photos,” on the web, Android, iPhone and iPad. It’s English only, Keep can’t hold PDFs, and Google doesn’t say whether it reads handwriting in a photo.

You’ll see guides for Grab image text, which copies a photo’s words into the note. Google described it in a 2017 tips post, and how-to videos from this year still show it, but Keep’s current help pages don’t mention it. Keep is free.

Bear

Yes, on Pro. Bear Pro can “search text inside photos and PDFs attached to the note,” in one note or across all of them, and it highlights the attachment that matched. Pro is $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. Scanning a document into a note is free, on iPhone and iPad. Its apps are for Mac, iPhone and iPad. It doesn’t search handwriting in its own sketches, and it doesn’t say either way about handwriting in photos.

Zoho Notebook

Yes, on Pro. Zoho’s pricing page puts “Smart & advanced search (OCR and object detection)” in Pro, which is $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. It searches text in images, scanned documents and photo cards, and Zoho says it reads handwritten pages you scan. Advanced search works in the Android, iPhone and Mac apps. Zoho doesn’t list Windows or the web. The scanner itself is free, on phones only.

Joplin

Yes, free, and it runs on your own computer. Joplin reads PNG and JPEG images and PDFs, scanned ones included, offline, with nothing uploaded. It’s been on by default since version 3.3, in May 2025. The reading only happens in the desktop app, and your phone gets the results when it syncs. Right-click an image and View OCR text shows what it read, so you can copy it. Joplin’s docs say handwriting isn’t supported. There’s an experimental handwriting option, off by default, that needs Joplin Server or Joplin Cloud. More in Joplin vs Evernote.

Goodnotes

Your handwriting, yes. Your photos, no. Goodnotes searches what you write with a pen and can convert it to text, on every plan, Free included, according to its pricing page. Imported PDFs are only searchable if they already have a text layer, or if you scanned them with Goodnotes’ own scanner. In Goodnotes’ words, it “does not subsequently add OCR to imported PDFs.” It doesn’t search text in images. Paid plans start at $11.99 a year.

Notability

Your handwriting, on a paid plan. Notability searches and converts handwriting on Classic, Plus and Pro, but not on Starter or Lite. Its scanner saves pages into a note as a PDF. It doesn’t say whether it reads text in photos or in scanned PDFs, and its App Store listing promises search of “handwriting, transcripts, text, and PDFs,” with no mention of images.

Notion

No. Notion’s search doesn’t look inside images, and Notion says scanned or image-only PDFs “won’t be reliably searchable unless OCR is run first.” Notion AI can read an uploaded PDF, or a photo of handwriting, when you ask it to. On the Business plan its AI search covers uploaded PDFs too. That’s an assistant reading a file on request, which is useful, but it isn’t search finding a word in your scans.

Obsidian

Not built in. Obsidian’s search covers notes and canvases, and nothing inside images or PDFs. Community plugins add it: Omnisearch, with a companion plugin called Text Extractor, reads images and PDFs on your own computer, desktop only. But Text Extractor’s author has marked it unmaintained, and its own page warns that “PDF files often fail to get their text extracted.” Obsidian itself is free.

Craft

No, and Craft says so. Its search “matches the names of images and files, not the text inside them. This includes text in photos, screenshots, and PDFs.” The workaround it offers is its AI Assistant, which can pull the text out of a screenshot or photo so you can paste it into the page. That uses your AI allowance, and on the free plan that’s about 15 to 25 sessions, ever.

UpNote

Not that we could find. There’s no mention of OCR in UpNote’s help center or in its release notes, through version 9.22.9 in late October. You can scan documents on its phone apps, but search covers note titles and content, so a scan stays a picture. Premium is $39.99 once.

Notesnook

No. Notesnook’s search matches an attachment by its file name, type and hash, not what’s inside. People have asked for OCR on its GitHub since March 2024, and that request is still open. On desktop and the web, its PDF viewer can find text inside the one PDF you have open. Everything in Notesnook is encrypted on your device before it’s uploaded, so any OCR would have to happen on your device too. We compared it with Evernote in Notesnook vs Evernote.

Standard Notes

No, on any plan. Files come with the $120-a-year Professional plan, and they’re end-to-end encrypted. Its founder explained the trade in 2019: the files “are all encrypted. Any kind of in-file search would also need to be done on the client side,” and “Client-side OCR is very, very poor compared to server-side.” On-device OCR has got a lot better since then. Apple’s Live Text and Joplin both do it. Standard Notes hasn’t added it.

Simplenote

No. Simplenote holds text and nothing else: “Images, PDFs, or any other attachments cannot be added to a note.” Automattic also said in September 2025 that it’s no longer in active development.

Handwriting is the hard part

“Handwriting” means two different things, and apps mix them up.

Ink you write in the app. You write with a pen or your finger, and the app keeps the strokes. Apps built for this read the strokes themselves and make them searchable. That’s Goodnotes, Notability, OneNote, and Apple Notes on an iPad.

Handwriting in a photo or a scan. A letter, a recipe card, a whiteboard, a census page. Now the app has to read a picture of someone’s writing, and that’s much harder. Neat print does well. Everyday cursive does fine. A hurried scrawl is a coin flip.

We tested the hard case once, on purpose. We ran a page of the 1860 U.S. Census through Harbor’s OCR and searched for 73 words written on it in an assistant marshal’s copperplate. Search found 53. The misses, and what caused them, are in our guide for genealogists.

A few habits help with any app:

• Scan flat and bright. A phone photo at an angle in a dim kitchen loses words that a flat, well-lit scan keeps.
• Search the unusual word. A surname or a street name finds the page. “The” finds everything.
• Give it time. Most apps read new files in the background, so a page you added a moment ago may not turn up yet. OneNote says some take a day or two.

Before you move a library of scans

Your old app’s OCR doesn’t come with you. Evernote keeps the text it read from each image inside your export, in an ENEX file’s <recognition> element. Joplin’s importer drops it, and so does ours. The new app reads every scan again, so check that it can before you move ten years of receipts. We explain what’s inside an export in what is an ENEX file, and how to get one out in how to export your Evernote notes.

Encryption and OCR pull against each other. An app can only read text it can see. If your notes are end-to-end encrypted, the company’s servers can’t read your scans, so any OCR has to happen on your own devices. Standard Notes’ founder gave exactly that reason in 2019, and Notesnook, which encrypts the same way, doesn’t search inside images either. It’s also why Harbor leaves encrypted notes out of OCR. We wrote up the whole trade in should you encrypt your notes?

Ask where the reading happens. Some apps read your files on your device. Others send them to a server. Neither is wrong, but you should know which you’re getting.

Where Harbor fits

We make Harbor, so read this part knowing that.

Harbor reads every image and PDF you add, on every plan, the free one included. There’s nothing to turn on. The one size limit: a file over 100 MB is found by its name only. Photos, scanned PDFs, and handwriting in a photo or a scan all go through it. When you open a result, the word is highlighted on the page, so you’re not reading a 40-page scan to find the line. It works on attachments your device hasn’t downloaded yet, because the reading happened on our servers when the file arrived. And Word, Excel, PowerPoint and text files are searchable too, without OCR, because their words are already text. How OCR search works in Harbor has the details and screenshots, and the feature itself is at Search & OCR.

Where it’s behind. Four places.

• No button to copy the text out. Harbor reads the words in an image so search can find them, but there’s no “copy text from picture.” OneNote, Joplin and Apple’s Live Text all do that.
• Pencil sketches stay sketches. Harbor has a sketch mode for Apple Pencil on iPad, but it doesn’t turn your strokes into typed text. If you write most of your notes by hand, Goodnotes, Notability, OneNote or Apple Notes will serve you better.
• The reading happens on a server. Harbor sends each image and PDF to Google Cloud Vision to read it. Google may not use it for its own purposes, and our privacy policy names it, but your file does leave your device. Joplin’s OCR runs on your own computer instead.
• Encrypted notes are left out. If you encrypt a note, we can’t read it, so its scans aren’t searchable. That’s the point of encrypting it, but it’s still a trade.

If your notes are mostly typed, none of this matters much, so choose on everything else. If they’re mostly paper, choose the app that reads paper, and try it on your worst page before you move ten years of it.

Sources

Evernote: Search overview · When scanned PDFs don’t show up in search · Starter and Advanced FAQ · Compare plans.

Apple: Search notes on Mac · Search notes on iPhone · Notes on the App Store · Handwriting on iPad · Scan text and documents · Search notes on iCloud.com.

Microsoft: Search notes in OneNote · Copy text from pictures on Windows · on a Mac · on the web · Handwritten notes · OneNote for Windows 10.

Google: Search notes in Keep · Google’s 2017 Keep tips.

Notion: Importing PDFs · Search · AI search of PDFs · Handwritten notes with Notion AI.

Bear: Bear Pro · Searching text in photos and PDFs · Sketches · Attachments and scanning.

Joplin: OCR · Desktop changelog · Handwriting transcription.

Zoho Notebook: Pricing · Pro plan · Search · Scanners · Notebook for students.

Obsidian: Search · Omnisearch · Text Extractor · Pricing.

UpNote: Search · Scan documents · Pricing.

Notesnook: Search · Attachments · OCR request.

Standard Notes: Plans · Encrypted files · The founder on OCR, 2019.

Craft: Search · Extract text from images and PDFs · AI usage.

Goodnotes: Searchable PDFs · Handwriting search · Pricing.

Notability: Compare plans · Handwriting conversion · Scanning · App Store listing.

Simplenote: Help · Development update.

Harbor: How OCR search works · Does Harbor handle handwriting? · Privacy policy · The 1860 census test.

Last checked: November 6, 2026. We read each company’s own help pages, pricing pages and changelogs for this post. Harbor’s row comes from our own documentation and the census test linked above, run in October. Features like these move, especially plan limits. If something here no longer matches what you see, tell us at hello@harbor.my and we’ll fix it and re-date this line.