Glyfen

Offline. Private. On-device.

Make every photo on your phone searchable

Glyfen is an entirely offline Android app that reads the text inside your images with on-device OCR, so you can search screenshots, receipts, notes, and signs like plain text. Nothing ever leaves your phone.

  • No internet permission
  • No accounts
  • No uploads
  • No tracking
  • Open source
Get it on F-Droid Start the guide
Glyfen Scan tab showing a list of recently scanned images with match percentages
The Scan tab's Recent Scans shows your latest results; use Search to find any scanned image.

What Glyfen does

Point Glyfen at the photo folders you choose. It runs optical character recognition (OCR) on each image directly on your device and builds a private, searchable text index. Later, type a word you remember and Glyfen surfaces the exact images that contain it.

Three tabs, one simple flow

  • Search

    Find any word or phrase across every image Glyfen has scanned, with filters and sorting.

  • Scan

    Turn the photos in the folders you choose into searchable text, on your device.

  • Settings

    Manage folders, storage, diagnostics, and privacy-friendly bug reports.

How it works in three steps

  1. Pick folders — choose which photo folders Glyfen may read.
  2. Scan — Glyfen extracts text from those images on-device.
  3. Search — find any image by the words inside it.
Glyfen search results for the word grapes, showing two matching receipts with confidence scores
Search results for a single word — Glyfen matches the text inside your photos.

Read the full guide

Step-by-step walkthroughs for every part of the app:

  1. Step 1 Install & first launch Install
  2. Step 2 Add & manage folders Folders
  3. Step 3 Scan your images Scan
  4. Step 4 Search your text Search
  5. Step 5 Settings Settings
  6. Step 6 Diagnostics & bug reports Diagnostics
  7. Step 7 Troubleshooting & FAQ Troubleshoot