Glyfen

Glyfen is an offline-first OCR app for Android that lets you search your photo library by text content. All processing happens entirely on your device — no cloud uploads, no internet required.

Point Glyfen at your photo folders and it scans every image for text using PaddleOCR. Receipts, documents, screenshots, business cards, labels — if an image contains printed text, Glyfen extracts it and makes it searchable.

A note on speed: because all OCR runs on your device, scanning takes time — and you always start it yourself. Glyfen never scans automatically or on a schedule. How long a scan takes depends on how many images it covers and your phone's hardware, so a large library on an older phone can take a while. Once you start a scan it keeps running even while you use other apps, and it resumes automatically if it's interrupted. Added new photos? Just run a scan again to index them.

Once scanned, your photos become searchable. Type a word and Glyfen lists every image whose text contains it, with a preview of the recognized text. Full-text search is powered by SQLite FTS5 for fast results even across thousands of indexed images.

Key features:

- Offline OCR: All text recognition runs on-device using PaddleOCR. No network connection, ever.
- Full-text search: Find any receipt, note, or screenshot by the words inside it, in seconds, powered by SQLite FTS5.
- Latin-script first: Recognition and dictionary correction are tuned for English and Latin scripts. The underlying PP-OCRv5 model also recognizes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, and more.
- Batch scanning: You pick the folders and start the scan yourself; Glyfen then processes them on-device and keeps running while you use other apps. Speed scales with how many images you scan and your phone's hardware.
- Private by design: No analytics SDKs, no ads, no accounts, no tracking. Nothing is ever sent automatically. Optional diagnostics and telemetry are off by default and only leave your device if you choose to share a bug report.
- EXIF-aware: Correctly handles rotated camera photos.
- Format support: JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIF/HEIC (Android 9+).
- Local-only storage: OCR results stay in a private database on your device and are never uploaded.
- Crash recovery: Scans resume from where they left off after interruption.
- Open source: Built from source and fully auditable, published on F-Droid.

Glyfen is free software, built from source and published on F-Droid. No ads, no accounts, no tracking.

Permissions: None requested up-front. You pick which folders Glyfen can read using the system folder picker — Glyfen never sees anything outside the folders you grant. No camera, microphone, or location access requested.

First public release.

- On-device OCR scanning with PaddleOCR (Latin + CJK)
- Full-text search across scanned photos (FTS5)
- Batch scanning with crash recovery
- EXIF-aware rotation handling
- JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIF/HEIC support
- Local-only database, never uploaded
- Light and Dark theme
- No analytics, no tracking, no cloud