FineReader Pro
reviews and complaints

I was amazed at the speed of this scanner. The OCR was the fastest of any of the IOS scanners I have tried. So far this is also the most accurate OCR I have used. I purchased another scanner, in fact I have most of them, and this is by far the most accurate. One "name" scanner I previously used gave horrible result with their OCR. Happy to now use Fine Scanner Pro.

I'm a big fan of the desktop ABBYY FineReader, so tried this mobile version. The operations and workflow are smooth. The results are good. This would be a 5-star review if (a) the cloud services included OneDrive, and OneDrive for Business, and custom WebDAV (all of which are supported by competitive products) and (b) the app feedback link from the App Store didn't result in a 404 error.

The server is working again, but I’m still upset that prior to purchasing this app there was no indication that the processing would be done on a server instead of on device.
Phones are pretty powerful these days and FineReader on the Mac doesn’t need to use a server. It means I have to use a different scanning app when working with sensitive legal documents on the go. Fortunately there’s a lot of competition in this area.

If you’re seeking high-quality scans then look at other options, including free. 50% of scans must be taken manually otherwise the app will never recognize the document borders. 75% of scans require reframing. Filters are the lowest quality.
If your primary need is OCR then this is a solid choice; however, others may have near OCR quality with much higher scan quality.
If given the choice I’d have opted for another app.

I tried other apps that claim to do the same thing, but this one best suits my needs for scanning books specifically (it made the pages the straightest out of the 3 apps). Whatever algorithm they are using for book scanning is great. I kind of wish the same algorithm was used for single document scanning as well. Hopefully in the future you will be able to manipulate nodes on a mesh grid for better accuracy instead of just 4 points.

In the past it was a scanner and computer to capture and recognize documents. In the past it was about working with restrictions. Now it's about getting the results in the moment. There's a need to scan a passport just as the plane is being boarded to create a pdf. No issue. There are notes in the bulletin at church I want to recognize to use in my ereader. It's done without any disturbance. There are so many ways to use this tool I am thankful for. Keep up the good work.

Waste of money. I bought the group package that included the Text grabber, Doc/Book scanner, and Biz card apps. None of these apps are of use to me. The Doc/Book scanner requires a internet connection which would have stopped my purchase had it been included in the product description. Next the scanner does not work that well at all, contrary to apps available on pc. If you want to scan a book, your better off doing a destructive scan (take it apart), send pages through using ADF @ high res and using ABBYY for pc or mac to put it together. This software maybe (with emphasis) be good in a pinch when nothing else is available.

I’ve been using FineScannerPRO for a few years now and it just keeps getting better! Scanning is simple with the iPad or iPhone and OCR is very accurate. I’ve been using it to recognize text in both English and Spanish, both of which work great. The new page area recognition features make it easier than ever to scan pages with little or no manual adjustments. Recognized documents can be downloaded in several useful file formats including MS Word, RTF, and plain text. I now do all my scanning and OCR on my iPad instead of my dedicated scanner. It is just so much faster and easier. You can also make a “photocopy” of any document just by printing the result of your scan. I would highly recommend this app!

I have well over a hundred recipe books on the shelves, plus many hundreds of individual recipes from the New York Times and elsewhere in three-ring notebooks. I needed a way to get printed contents into my AnyList recipe and grocery shopping list app. FineScanner Pro is this home cook’s perfect OCR dream app for moving ingredients, preparation, cooking times, servings and nutrition data and more from shelf or binder via the camera and into my device. If I need to, with FineScanner’s help I can do meal planning from among my favorite recipes while sitting in the grocery store parking lot... A capability once limited to expensive laptop and desktop software is now within affordable reach of the stovetop!

Wow, this app literally saved my student life :) Was preparing my thesis, needed to scan more than 1000 pages just in 2 days, cause my teacher gave me those books just for a weekend. I don't know how long it would have taken me if I had been using a usual flatbed scanner. But this app allows you to scan double-page spread taking just 1 photo, and it does it reeeaaally quick! So 1 photo — and you have 2 pages perfectly scanned. And the real thing is that Finescanner can also capture the text in those scans, so you can even make an editable .doc file out of your simple iphone photo and copy/paste the text into your thesis! That's definitely the coolest stuff, thanks a lot devs, I owe you a part of my degree :))

Update: after spending $50 on this app, they are still spamming me and trying to now get a subscription fee.

This is a terrible app and not worth the money.

I purchased this in order to quickly scan several cookbooks that I have.

This app has several flaws:

-Poor edge detection

Once you take photos of the book pages, you must go through and manually pick the edge of the book. This is tedious and other apps do a much better job with much less manual intervention.

-Long processing time

After the edges of the book are marked, the images must be processed and sent to their servers. This seems odd and unnecessary. It also took a long time to process for just a few dozen pages.

-inaccurate OCR

Even after all this, it still made many mistakes which are time consuming to correct.

I am extremely disappointed with this app and do not recommend others purchase it.

It advertises that it supports Japanese so I got it. I think it’s terribly unfair that there is no trial period and the AppStore has told me that I do not qualify for a refund. Anyway.

I bought the app to scan Japanese paperbacks to text files for reading on the voice dream text to speech app.

It seems to scan the books ok although I have yet to figure out how to redo a scan when you know it came out wrong like you hand is covering some of the text without opening all the images and then scrolling to end to finally pull up the most recent image to delete it and redo it.

But the big problem with Japanese is that the text is right to left and top to bottom. The app can’t seem to figure this out all of you OCR it locally on your phone and the resulting text is nonsense.

If you do the option to send it to the server for the OCR then it does a better job but it only partially understands how Japanese books are formatted. The app scans two pages at a time. So the server knows that the text on each page starts in the top right and goes down and then to the left. But it doesn’t realize that the page order also goes right to left. So it will totally mix up the page order. The result is a pretty useless scan. I can only guess that they don’t have Japanese speakers working there and no Japanese customers.

So far I find the app to be very solid. However, due to it being priced similarly to a desktop app, my expectations are very high, and so my baseline expectation is something closer to desktop performance. I've got FineReader on the Mac, which is a truly amazing app, so my baseline expectation is very high indeed. In light of that, here are a couple of important areas that could be improved:

1) FineReader on the desktop does some unskewing of pages scanned in when the image was created at an angle that creates a sort of weird trapezoid. The technology isn't perfect, but it's darn impressive for what it is, and really cleans up an image. Since, in my understanding, scans in FineScanner are being primarily processed in the cloud anyways, the addition of an "unskew" option for the iPhone app seems like it would be a great value add and not too hard to implement. As is, I find myself processing scans created with FineScanner in FineReader anyways for the unskew feature, which adds an extra step and kinda defeats the purpose a bit (since if I wanted to deal with FineReader I could just snap raw images on my iPhone and process those directly).

2. The app's book mode struggles with larger format pages. One application I have used the app for is scanning large legal treatises. These can be quite large indeed, and if I try to use book mode the text quality comes out pretty garbage. This may be more a limit of the phone's camera resolution and not so much of the app. That's understandable if so, but the app should at least detect when a page is too big for book mode to handle with quality and suggest you do single page scans instead (which is what I figured out as a solution, after trial and error). And of course hopefully as phone camera tech improves FineScanner will be able to take advantage of that and grab even large format books with ease in book mode.

Overall though this is a solid app!

[update 6/24, new comments at end] I use this app a good deal but am always cussing it out. The annoyances are for just a couple of factors. I use it for long double page book scans. It’s annoying to have to upload the images for processing; but everybody knows about that. Nevertheless, the processed results are of variable quality. Many pages are great and divided nicely. But in each set there are always a few with strange curvy edges and wavy lines or crops well inside the page boundaries. Using the crop tool only lets us crop within the selected image; we can’t back out. We can’t recrop the original scan. A retake usually provides exactly what we want (after cropping the double page spread down to one page). Though sometimes it is necessary to make a few retakes; then suddenly it’s perfect. My wishlist: 1. Let the crop tool access the entire original scan. 2. Give us a mode where we just scan and crop without remote processing. My editing of the retake is always exactly what I want, with no server processing step. 3. Let us repaginate manually, cropping and dividing where we want, even after the document has been saved.
[update begins]
My comments above still stand. I just spent 90 minutes scanning and correcting part of a long document. As before, every five pages or so one page was unusable (skewed and distorted or over-cropped), so I rescanned each of those. As before, it was very easy to scan and crop exactly what I wanted on retake. If there were a “retake mode” where I could simply add page after page manually, without using the server at all, I’d be delighted. Also, several of the two page spreads did not get split in half, so I had to crop the oversize document and then use ‘add’ to scan the missing half. Finally, after retaking nearly all the errors and editing the second-to-last bad page, the app crashed to the iOS home screen and all my work was lost.

This app would be ideal if I could 1) scan docs locally without any server processing or OCR, 2) crop anything in the entire original image, and c) move pages around within the scanned document if some are out of order. The crop and filter tools are great, and the page splitting would be great if it were local. I don’t see any reason for server use, unless OCR is needed; and even then it shouldn’t really be needed.

I require the ability in a scanner to set custom document size. I just tried the app on a 3 x 6 in document and no ability to adjust to the correct size. I don't want to have it fill a Letter or A4 paper when I print.

Not as useful as before….

Feel I was ripped off
Japanese ocr scan does not work at all

Bought too quickly...not scanning in color...hope it is a setting.

Really poor scan quality - ScannerPro has a much better capture quality.

Would like to configure auto save name
YYYYMMDD SAVE to onedrive not in app or app cloud.

Recently the crop quality is completely shot. This used to be a good program, not so much anymore

I’m amazed how poor the image quality is for scanned documents. Try Adobe Scan instead. It’s free!

This app is the worst. It doesn’t let my mail documents to my email even though I paid for premium

The app crashes a lot and shuts down when trying to scan and crop a book. And when the app is reopened all of the scanned pages are gone

The OCR recognition is OK, but after scanning a document, the content is uploaded for recognition which can often take up to five minutes or more, for processing!

Can you please implement offline OCR like the Text Grabber app and make language downloadable. In some places it's not always possible to have Internet connection.

Thank you

When I do PDFs the quality is really bad. $5 app is better than FineScanner.
I mean it has to be really good quality. Some of the things on PDFs you can’t even read. That was not the reason I paid $80.

this app requires consent of collecting data and receive ads from thema and 3rd party. i did not agree and so i wont be able to use the app.. i uninstalled it but apple wont refund the money so I paid for nothing. this is BS!

Good lord, this is upsetting. I used to be obsessed with the ABBYY suite of apps, and they were truly the best and most efficient scanning and ocr apps. Now, the quality of the picture isn’t nearly as good as if one simply used the native camera app and imported everything. Really angers me.

Bought both the iPad app and the Mac app to try to scan book. Ask a simple question of customer service - can you recommend an an app or a shortcut to activate the camera if you’re scaning docs - it would be nice not to have a blur due to camera movement. During activation. No response from Abby.

TurboScan or Scanner Pro they do the same or better for a lot less money.
This is completely ridiculous, to add more pages if you have them in your mail you have to take photos edit them send to gallery close gallery return to the app open it to drag the gallery document and then add them with the ones you already had?