OCR reads pixels. File formats decide how those pixels are stored — losslessly, lossily, or as multi-page documents. Choosing a sensible format is an easy accuracy win.

Textify Image accepts PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, and PDF up to 50 MB. Here is how to choose.

PNG

Best for: screenshots, UI, line art, text-heavy graphics

PNG is lossless. Sharp edges on letters stay sharp. Prefer PNG when you control the capture (macOS/Windows screenshots often default to PNG).

Downside: large file size for camera photos.

JPEG

Best for: photographs of paper under natural light

JPEG is lossy. At high quality it is perfectly usable for OCR. At low quality (messengers, aggressive email compressors) it smears high-contrast letter edges and invents blocky noise.

Tips:

Export at high quality when you have the option
Do not repeatedly open-and-save JPEG in editors
If a photo looks blocky when zoomed on text, recapture or find a better original

WebP and AVIF

Modern formats with strong compression. They can be excellent when encoded at high quality, and painful when encoded aggressively for the web.

If you download an image from a site and OCR fails, try to find a larger source asset. The format logo on the file extension is less important than the effective resolution and compression level.

PDF

Best for: multi-page scans and mixed documents

PDF can embed lossless or lossy page images, or real text. See how to extract text from a PDF for the text-layer vs scan distinction.

When building a scan PDF yourself, 300 DPI grayscale is a sturdy default for office paper.

What not to do

Screenshot a photo of a document displayed in a chat bubble
Convert PNG → low-quality JPEG “to make it smaller” before OCR
Upload a tiny thumbnail and expect full-page accuracy

Smaller is not better if the letters disappear.

Size limits and practical splits

Textify Image allows up to 50 MB per file. If you exceed that:

Split PDF page ranges
Re-encode photos at slightly lower resolution after confirming text still looks sharp when zoomed
Remove unused pages

Never crush quality just to sneak under a limit if the text becomes soft.

Quick chooser

Source	Prefer
App or browser screenshot	PNG
Phone photo of paper	High-quality JPEG or original HEIC converted carefully
Multi-page scan	PDF
Downloaded web image	Largest available; WebP/AVIF OK if sharp

Related guides

Pick a sharp original, pick a gentle format, then let OCR do the reading. Most format problems are really compression problems in disguise.

Best image formats for OCR: PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, and PDF

PNG