Lens

A simple OCR tool for GNOME. Point it at anything on your screen and pull the text out.

Features

• Extract text from screenshots, images, PDFs, QR codes and more
• Drag and drop image files directly onto the window
• Paste images from clipboard
• Auto-copy extracted text to clipboard
• Automatically open URLs found in QR codes
• Text-to-speech support
• Share extracted text directly to email, Telegram, Mastodon and more
• Multi-language OCR support via Tesseract

Installation

Build from source (Flatpak)

Requirements:

• flatpak
• flatpak-builder
• GNOME Platform runtime 49

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Platform//49 org.gnome.Sdk//49
flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build-dir flatpak/io.github.seed43.lens.json

Then run:

flatpak run io.github.seed43.lens

Building for development

The easiest way to develop Lens is with GNOME Builder. Open the project folder in Builder and press Execute (F5).

Or manually with Meson:

meson setup build
cd build
ninja
ninja install

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.

Original work copyright © 2021-2025 Andrey Maksimov
Modifications copyright © 2026-present Seed-43

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or pull requests on GitHub.