The pictures and photos Read by Zaweba can open

Most text recognition jobs start with a picture of some kind, and the first thing you want to know is whether the app will open yours. Read by Zaweba reads PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, WEBP and HEIC files, and with TIFF it reads every page, not just the first. That covers screenshots, scanner output, camera and phone photos and most images saved from the web.

Read opens these through Windows' own image codecs, the same components that let Photos and File Explorer show pictures. That keeps Read small and means it handles files the way the rest of Windows does.

Phone photos the right way up

A phone doesn't always rotate the picture itself. Often it saves the image sideways and adds a note, called the EXIF orientation, saying which way up it should be shown. Programs that ignore the note show your document lying on its side. Read reads the note and turns phone photos upright before doing anything else.

That matters for text recognition more than for viewing. An engine reading a sideways page sees columns of letters on their sides, and the result is nonsense. Getting the orientation right at the start saves the clean-up steps from having to guess.

WEBP and HEIC

Two of the formats depend on extras that Windows doesn't always have installed. WEBP is common for pictures saved from websites. HEIC is the format iPhones use by default for photos. Both need Microsoft Store extensions for Windows to decode them.

Rather than failing with a vague error, Read tells you exactly what is missing. For HEIC that means HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions. Install what it names, open the file again, and it reads normally. If you'd rather not install anything, set the phone or browser to save as JPEG instead; Read handles that with no extras.

Multi-page TIFFs

TIFF files can hold many pages, and scanners and fax software often save whole documents that way. Read reads every page. A multi-page document gets a page list with thumbnails in the review, so you can move through the pages and check each one beside its text. When you save, the pages stay together in one result, whether that's a .docx, a searchable PDF or plain text.

Getting the best from each kind of picture

Screenshots are usually crisp but small, so make them at a decent zoom if you can. Read won't crop a screenshot during clean-up, because there is no page edge to find.

Phone photos benefit most from Read's clean-up, which can find the page, flatten it, remove shadows and straighten it. Still, a steady, well-lit photo taken square on gives better text than one rescued afterwards. Fill the frame with the page and avoid strong shadows from your hand or the phone.

Scans are the easiest. A clean scan at a sensible resolution needs little help. Read's Help tab is honest that handwriting, low-resolution pictures and decorative fonts aren't read reliably, whatever the format.

Other ways in

Pictures are only one route. Read also opens scanned PDFs, reads straight from a scanner, takes a picture or files pasted with Ctrl+V, and accepts files or whole folders dropped on the window. Whichever way a picture arrives, it goes through the same clean-up and review, so the format you start with matters far less than the quality of the picture itself.