Extract the numbers from an image
Most scanners give you a paragraph when what you wanted was forty-seven digits. This one keeps the digits and the decimal point, and drops the words, spaces and dashes around them.
Show everything the scan found
This tool runs in the browser. The app does the same from your camera, keeps a history, and works offline.
What this does differently
A general text scanner reads the whole image and hands you prose with the numbers buried inside. This tool constrains the recognition engine to a digit alphabet before it starts, which does two useful things: it stops the engine turning a 5 into an S or a 0 into an O, and it strips the surrounding words so you can paste straight into a spreadsheet cell.
Precisely: each result keeps its digits and any decimal point, and loses spaces, dashes, brackets and plus signs. So +880 1890-960505 comes back as 8801890960505, and 1,284.50 comes back as 1284.50. Values are found one line or column at a time, so a number is never spliced together out of two different rows.
It is the digits-only half of Number Mode in the SwipeScan app; the app also removes thousands separators, normalises the decimal separator to the one you set, and keeps a leading sign or a trailing percent.
Getting a clean read
- Crop tight. The single biggest improvement. Capture just the row of digits, not the whole screen.
- Square on. A photo taken at an angle turns a
1into a7more often than you would think. - Watch the separators. A thousands separator that is a full stop in one country is a comma in another — which mark means what, and where. Check which came back before pasting into a spreadsheet.
- Long strings need a second look. See why OCR gets digits wrong — the maths is unforgiving past about twelve characters.
When your phone already does this
If you are on an iPhone and the number is printed clearly in a normal font, Live Text will read it from the Photos app and you need nothing else. Android has the same through Google Lens. Reach for a specialised tool when the digits sit on a seven-segment display, a low-contrast game interface or a dot-matrix printout — or when the string is long enough that one wrong character makes the whole value useless.
Questions
Does the image get uploaded?
No. Recognition happens inside your browser tab. The file never leaves your device and there is no account.
It returned the digits but lost the decimal point.
Decimal separators are easy to lose at low resolution. Crop tighter around the number and retry, and always check the separator before pasting into a spreadsheet.
Can it read handwriting?
Sometimes, badly. Printed digits are far more reliable — handwritten sevens and ones are the usual failure.
Guides for this
The tool reads the number. These cover where it lives, why a read fails, and what to do with the result.
Inventory Count App: Counting Stock by Camera
An inventory count app that reads labels beats retyping, but a barcode beats both. What makes a label read badly, and what to do when there is no barcode.
Decimal Separator: 1,234.56 or 1.234,56?
The decimal separator is a comma across most of Europe and a point in the US. Same quantity, two spellings, and a scanner that guesses wrong moves the value.
Numbers Stored as Text: Why SUM Returns Zero
Numbers stored as text look identical to numbers and SUM ignores every one of them. How the coercion fails, how to prove it, and how to repair the column.
Best Coupon Scanner Apps, and What They Miss
A coupon scanner app reads the barcode. It cannot read an alphanumeric promo code, and that gap is where most people get stuck. Here is what works for each.
Best Number Scanner Apps for iPhone and Android
Every number scanner app on the App Store is really a document scanner. Compared on live store data: ratings, languages, size, and what each one actually reads.
Image to Excel: the Traps in Data From Picture
Image to Excel works well until a long number appears. Excel's Data from Picture, the 15-digit ceiling, lost leading zeros, and how to avoid each of them.
Extract Phone Numbers From an Image or Photo
Extract phone numbers from an image: the free tools that already do it, the numbering rules that catch misreads, and how to clean the list before you dial.
OCR Accuracy: Why Numbers Come Out Wrong
OCR accuracy is quoted per character, which hides the real problem. On a long number the whole string is what matters, and that falls away fast. Here is the maths.
Do this with a camera instead
Your phone will offer its camera right here — the file picker above includes Take Photo. What the app adds is selecting a region on the photo it just took, a paid history of every scan, working with no connection, and no 7 MB engine download. The check-digit verification on this page is a web feature and is not in the app yet.