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Prizmo
Prizmo
3.7.2

4.2

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Prizmo free download for Mac

Prizmo

3.7.2
22 July 2019

Scan and OCR documents with your digital camera or scanner.

Overview

Prizmo 3 is a scanning application with optical character recognition (OCR) in over 40 languages with powerful editing capability, text-to-speech, and iCloud support.

No matter what capture device is at hand, Prizmo is the key for scanning and performing OCR. It works with pictures taken with your iPhone, iPad, or digital camera; with documents coming from connected or Wi-Fi scanners; even with screenshots! It will help you easily scan any documents (invoices, receipts, boards, giant advertisements...) of any sizes (US Letter, US Legal, A4, and custom)...

Features:
  • Specific processing for business cards, multipage texts and images
  • Input file formats: regular photo files including JPEG, RAW, TIFF, as well as PDF files (even multipage)
  • Input options: digital cameras (iPhone, iPad, DSLRs...), camera tethering, connected and Wi-fi scanners, screenshots, snap any text from your screen
  • State-of-the-art OCR technology in 40 Languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
  • Detection of 3 types of regions: texts, images and numbers
  • OCR editing and correction: add, delete, merge and reorder regions on the one hand, edit text for correcting mistakes on the other hand
  • Automatic frame detection: lay the page, snap it, and let Prizmo handle the cropping
  • Automatic text orientation detection
  • Perspective correction to compensate camera point-of-view
  • Non-linear lens distortion correction
  • Page curvature correction for books and magazines
  • Real-time OCR results: moving/resizing region frames immediately updates text results
  • Resolution increase: image enhancement allows OCR results where OCR is generally not even thinkable
  • Output formats: image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF), and text files (PDF with Spotlight-searchable text, RTF, TXT) - even multipage!
  • Export to the Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and WebDAV online services
  • Online translation into 23 languages
  • Accessibility feedback for the OCR processing (blank, blurry image, etc.)
  • Text-to-Speech for reading scanned texts: over 70 high-quality voices in 26 languages with navigation settings and interactive reading progress display (available for free in OS X Preferences)
  • Enhanced for the Retina display.

What's new in Prizmo

Version 3.7.2:
Fixed:
  • A crash that could occur when moving or resizing a text region
  • A crash when using the Snap Screen tool when multiple displays are attached to the Mac
  • The page cropping user interface that could become corrupt when selecting another page

Prizmo Screenshots

  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots
  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots
  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots
  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots
  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots
  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots
  • Prizmo for Mac - review, screenshots

50 Prizmo Reviews

See all

Rate this app:

GRMartin
GRMartin
22 April 2015

Most helpful

For a lot of users Prizmo can see like a real niche tool, however i have found it useful in some of the most bizarre aways in my regular workflow. When i look to buy any software--like any other tool--i look at the perceived ROI. I have to admit that Prizmo didn't seem like it had much at first. However i had first gotten a copy as part of some other flash-sale like deal in the past, and started using it for 1 feature alone and have found it useful in a handful of small, strange ways since. My first real use for this too was as a fast way to unskew whiteboard pictures--i am a mobile application developer, and since cellular cameras have gotten so good, we rarely copy them down in notes anymore--I had an iPhone App for this, many actually, but found them to be reasonably rough to use on such a small screen. Now i just send them to myself as i take them, use Prizmo to straiten up on my Mac and save them to Evernote. The completely unexpected use i found was the handiness of having a live on-screen OCR tool. What i mean by that is Prizmo can sit in your menu bar--not a new feature so many apps do it, i now have too to simply manage that--however, one thing i do find really cool is you can tell it to OCR the screen, it will give you a cross hair cursor and you can lasso a portion of your screen, it will then OCR that section and copy it to your clipboard for further processing. I use this to copy content from things like the Mac AppStore, UI elements that I'm putting in documentation and would like the exact text too, extracting text out of protected PDFs for simple things such as extracting times and costs rather than retyping it all--did this for my mortgage, put it through Soulver and saved me and full of pricing questions--its an incredible feature, and since i use many Virtual Machines for my job (Linux, Windows) and Simulators and Emulators for devices (Android and iOS) this feature transitions really well to any of those programs to simply grab the text on the screen. Anyway i know some of these are narrow uses, but i felt the need to simply point them out as for me it is an oddly unique part of my personal workflow.
Like (13)
Version 3.1.1
Miminana
Miminana
07 August 2018
Works well in a number of different and flexible ways and I am impressed with its ability to make sense of dodgy scans. I would recommend this to anyone!
Like (1)
Version 3.5.3
selizabethwebb
selizabethwebb
26 April 2018
Good app, convenient and easy to use.
Like
Version 3.5
Marko85
Marko85
26 April 2018
Prizmo 3.5 seems to have greatly improved OCR accuracy when you don't have high-quality scanned material in very high DPI to work with (if you don't have like 300 DPI or 600 DPI images, like what someone would want to use for OCR usually)... for example, I opened a picture of a newspaper in the Preview.app and that image had only about 150 DPI... individual lowercase letters on that image were about 5px wide (I zoomed in first to count the pixels, then pressed CMD+0 to zoom out)... and I first tried it with the Menu Bar tool, to just select that part of the screen where that image was and get text copied to the clipboard... and the recognized text was mostly accurate (there were some small errors in some places, but only a minimal amount of manual corrections was needed... and I'm very satisfied with how accurate it was considering that letters on that image were pixelated and I understand that it can be very difficult for an OCR app to distinguish between some characters if letters on some image are only about 5 px wide... and as I mentioned, that was just a quick OCR with that Menu Bar tool). So for that I would give it 5 stars... But I was kind of disappointed that they removed some languages... I'm especially disappointed that OCR for Hebrew is missing because that's not the same like if one of the languages that uses Latin or Cyrillic script was removed, since if two languages use almost the same alphabet (or exactly the same in some cases), then OCR for one mostly works for another language which uses that alphabet (and maybe it would only need some corrections here and there or something like that)... but Hebrew has it's own alphabet, so if Hebrew isn't supported in some version of the app, you can't do OCR for it at all with that version of the app. But at least the previous version still works... so I'm not going to reduce the amount of stars for this rating, since I hope that they will bring back Hebrew and make OCR for it more accurate.
Like (1)
Version 3.5
1 answer(s)
Marko85
Marko85
29 April 2018
After using the new version (Prizmo 3.5) for a couple of days and comparing it to the previous version (Prizmo 3.1.18), I've noticed that the previous versions can be somewhat more accurate in some cases, while the new version seems more accurate in some other cases... so if you haven't updated yet, I would recommend that you back up the previous version before updating if you need it later.

The new version (3.5) seems more accurate when recognizing text in conditions that are less optimal, like when trying to do OCR from photos in lower resolution where text is more pixelated and less clear... it seems to make fewer errors in those cases when compared to the previous version... the new version also seems to recognize more words correctly when dealing with some "calligraphic" fonts where letters can have more "decorations" (for example, the "Old English" and "Old German" font styles... although some characters in some of those font styles can still have recognition issues, especially some of the uppercase characters with more "decorations", which usually make letters more difficult to recognize for OCR apps... but it seems better than it was)...

That new OCR that the new version (Prizmo 3.5) is using seems better for things that were more difficult for the old version to do...

But the previous version (Prizmo 3.1.18) seems to be more accurate when the conditions for OCR are more optimal, like when recognizing text from high-quality Retina screenshots with very clear text that uses some very common font in larger sizes and where the background is just a plain color without some "noise"... or if you have scanned some page in high DPI and the font is very readable... or something like that...

The new version isn't really "bad" at recognizing text from Retina screenshots or high DPI scans, but I've noticed multiple times that it sometimes made some small mistakes when doing an OCR from a high-resolution image in places where the previous version didn't seem to get "confused" with the same image and the same font... like confusing a lowercase "i" in some words with "1" in a text that uses the Georgia font with 18px font size or something like that (and if you take a screenshot and zoom in, since it's a Retina screenshot, that lowercase "i" has about 28px in height on the actual screenshot, out of which 5px is just the dot, with about 4px between the dot and rest of the letter)... and confusing the lowercase "i" for "1" would maybe be expected when dealing with a lower-resolution image or if the image was noisy and it wasn't clear that the dot on the letter "i" was there (the rest of the letter does look similar to "1" in Georgia font, although "1" in Georgia font would still be somewhat taller and wider than "i" without a dot, but on a low-resolution image that may not be very clear), but with a 18px font size on a Retina screenshot it is very clear that it's a letter "i" and not "1" and the previous version didn't seem to get confused with it in places where the new version confused it with "1"... with some other fonts without "serifs", I've also noticed that the new version confused a lowercase "l" (lowercase L) in some words with a lowercase "i" or something like that (which would also be expected if the resolution was low, but I'm writing about text on Retina screenshots, that was clear enough for the previous version to identify same letters correctly)... it doesn't seem like a huge drawback, but I've just seen cases where the previous version recognized all words correctly and when trying to do OCR of the same text with the new version, a few small corrections were needed.

So, for the kind of images that already had very high OCR accuracy when using the previous version, the previous version still seems better for those images.

I hope that there would be some update soon to make the new version as optimized for larger font sizes as the previous version is... and that they would also bring back OCR support for Hebrew in that update.
Like (1)
OhEssex
OhEssex
23 April 2018
I use this program and I do like it - but, seriously, their marketing guy has to go. All this complete drivel about neural network enhancements within their software is just making my stomach turn...
Like
Version 3.5
Meitnik
Meitnik
14 October 2017
App has matured into a great tool for me. Btw, its vastly better than ReadIris 16! Abbyy is second best but many flawed features; not feature parity with the windows version. However, Creeed is deeply dependent on Google's OCR tech; not a good situation. So I don't see Prizmo eating Omnipage anytime soon. After 25 yrs, no one is willing to make a really powerful OCR tool for the Mac.
Like
Version 3.1.18
Marko85
Marko85
30 April 2017
I tried the demo version and I especially liked that Menu Bar tool to get the text from screenshots, so I wouldn't have to retype them if I have to get some text from a screenshot. Although OCR software can sometimes make a mistake if the letters on some picture aren't very clear and the demo version additionally replaces random words with characters like this "••••••••", it's still easier to make corrections here and there and to retype some words than to retype everything manually if the scanned image has more than a few words. I think it's one of the best OCR apps for Mac, but it's kind of expensive for me, since I don't need to use OCR software a lot... and usually I only need it for getting text from screenshots... so I mostly just used that Menu Bar tool that Prizmo has... but if they have some sale or a discount, I would definitely consider getting it. BTW... I wish there was an option to just always have that Menu Bar tool in the Menu Bar, without having to open the app to use it.
Like (1)
Version 3.1.17
1 answer(s)
TomLoredo
TomLoredo
08 September 2017
Marko85, FYI, Condense is an inexpensive app specifically for grabbing text from your screen using OCR. I have it and have only occasionally used it, but it's worked pretty well for me. I've added it to the "Similar Software" list here; currently has 4.5* here on MacUpdate (albeit with just 7 reviews).
Like
Psifi
Psifi
07 December 2016
The developer has confirmed that this app is compatible with Sierra.
Like
Version 3.1.16
Meitnik
Meitnik
28 March 2016
3.19 is very, very slow on a 4k imac with 10.11.3....I need 3.18 please. I am a registered user. Can anyone help me. please. Simple things take forever now. Sorry I updated the app.
Like
Version 3.1.9
3 answer(s)
Jlock
Jlock
28 March 2016
Here is the download for 3.1.8: http://creaceed.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/prizmo3_3.1.8.zip
Like (1)
Meitnik
Meitnik
02 April 2016
Found out it was Adobe CC crap app that slowing 3.1.9 down. Fixed now. Hate adobe.
Like
Xenophile
Xenophile
10 January 2017
So you nailed Prizmo with a two star review because Adobe CC slowed down your Mac???
Like
bobembry
bobembry
12 January 2016
Very handy for taking notes from Kindle using the screen grab feature. Imagine combining this with a clipboard manager—Copy'em Paste. Also useful for extracting text from email images
Like
Version 3.1.6
GRMartin
GRMartin
22 April 2015
For a lot of users Prizmo can see like a real niche tool, however i have found it useful in some of the most bizarre aways in my regular workflow. When i look to buy any software--like any other tool--i look at the perceived ROI. I have to admit that Prizmo didn't seem like it had much at first. However i had first gotten a copy as part of some other flash-sale like deal in the past, and started using it for 1 feature alone and have found it useful in a handful of small, strange ways since. My first real use for this too was as a fast way to unskew whiteboard pictures--i am a mobile application developer, and since cellular cameras have gotten so good, we rarely copy them down in notes anymore--I had an iPhone App for this, many actually, but found them to be reasonably rough to use on such a small screen. Now i just send them to myself as i take them, use Prizmo to straiten up on my Mac and save them to Evernote. The completely unexpected use i found was the handiness of having a live on-screen OCR tool. What i mean by that is Prizmo can sit in your menu bar--not a new feature so many apps do it, i now have too to simply manage that--however, one thing i do find really cool is you can tell it to OCR the screen, it will give you a cross hair cursor and you can lasso a portion of your screen, it will then OCR that section and copy it to your clipboard for further processing. I use this to copy content from things like the Mac AppStore, UI elements that I'm putting in documentation and would like the exact text too, extracting text out of protected PDFs for simple things such as extracting times and costs rather than retyping it all--did this for my mortgage, put it through Soulver and saved me and full of pricing questions--its an incredible feature, and since i use many Virtual Machines for my job (Linux, Windows) and Simulators and Emulators for devices (Android and iOS) this feature transitions really well to any of those programs to simply grab the text on the screen. Anyway i know some of these are narrow uses, but i felt the need to simply point them out as for me it is an oddly unique part of my personal workflow.
Like (13)
Version 3.1.1
4 answer(s)
PaulDWeiss
PaulDWeiss
22 April 2015
That's one of the best reviews of actual usage models I've ever seen. Thanks!
Like (2)
macsavy
macsavy
01 May 2015
I agree with PaulDWeiss. When I saw the ad for this app, I said, I don't need OCR, but BOY would I make use of it the same way that Glenn R. Martin does. Thanks for the great, insightful review.
Like (2)
Pir-anha
Pir-anha
28 August 2015
Thank you for one of the most useful use case reviews I've seen on this site, ever.
Like (1)
Brookhaven
Brookhaven
18 November 2015
Good grief - wish I had known that earlier. Nice tip.
Like (2)
$49.99

4.2

App requirements: 
  • Intel 64
  • OS X 10.10.0 or later
Category: 

Productivity

Developer Website: 
Creaceed SPRL
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