How to OCR a HEIC photo from your iPhone
Read by Zaweba reads text from iPhone HEIC photos once Windows has the HEIF and HEVC extensions, and tells you which ones to install if they're missing.
You can OCR a HEIC photo by opening it in Read by Zaweba, which reads the text as long as Windows can decode HEIC. That needs two extensions from the Microsoft Store, HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions. If either is missing, Read doesn't just fail; it says exactly which one to install.
iPhones save photos as HEIC by default. It's an efficient format, but plenty of Windows software still can't open it, which is annoying when you've just photographed a page of notes, a receipt or a sign and want the words on your PC.
Why the extensions matter
Read by Zaweba opens pictures through Windows' own image codecs rather than carrying its own decoder for every format. For PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP and GIF, Windows has everything built in. HEIC and WEBP are different: the decoding comes from Store extensions. Once they're installed, Windows can open HEIC in any program that uses its codecs, Read included.
So the first time you drop an iPhone photo on Read, one of two things happens. Either it opens and is read straight away, or Read shows a plain message naming the extension to install. Install it from the Microsoft Store, open the photo again, and it works.
How to do it
Copy the photo from the iPhone to your PC however you usually do: a cable, a shared folder or cloud storage you already use. Then start Read and drop the HEIC file on the window, or open the folder it's in. You can paste files copied in File Explorer with Ctrl+V too.
Read turns the photo upright using the orientation the phone saved with it, so a page shot in portrait or landscape comes the right way round. For a photo of a document, the clean-up steps help a lot: Read can find the sheet of paper in the photo, flatten its perspective, even out shadows and straighten it. The Document tab lists what it did.
Look over the result in the side-by-side review. The text is editable, and when Tesseract did the reading, uncertain words are shaded amber with F8 to jump between them. Then copy the text, or save it as plain text, a .docx document, a searchable PDF or CSV for tables.
Getting a good result from a phone photo
Clean-up is what makes phone photos workable. In Read's own testing, a photographed letter at an angle with shadows across it read as accurately after clean-up as a clean scan did, while the same raw photo with no clean-up read nothing at all. So let Read do its clean-up rather than cropping and editing the photo yourself beforehand.
A few habits still help. Hold the phone above the page rather than at a steep slant, get the whole page in, and avoid blur. Good light helps less than you'd think, since shadow removal handles uneven lighting, but very small or out of focus text will always be hard. Handwriting is listed among Read's honest limits.
If you'd rather not deal with HEIC at all
You can set the iPhone's camera to save in the most compatible format instead, which gives JPEG files that Windows opens without any extension. That's a setting on the phone, not in Read. Either way works; Read just needs Windows to be able to open the picture.
Nothing is uploaded at any stage. The photo, the cleaned-up page and the text all stay on your PC with Read by Zaweba.
