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olmOCR 2 7B

reads text from scans (OCR), including tables

5.5 GB · needs about 5.5 GB of memory · smallest file

Runs in:
Fits on:
Flavors:File · 5.5 GB

How good is it?

The document reader to pick when the scan is more than a clean page of print.

This job is not on the July 2026 chat board, so the line above comes from the model card.

Clean printed pages come out well. Handwriting, messy photos, and tiny type are weaker. Tesseract and PaddleOCR are light. olmOCR and Qwen2.5-VL read the page more like a person, and they need a few gigabytes.

Will it fit?

A green light means it fits and feels fine. Amber means it fits, with a wait or a tight memory pool. Red means the file is bigger than the room we count.

HONEST COMPARISON

Local or cloud: Turn a photo or scan into text?

Reviewed Oct 2026

  • Privacy: Local winsScans never leave your computer
  • Cost: Local winsFree and unlimited pages
  • Quality: Cloud winsBetter on handwriting and complex tables
  • Ease: Cloud winsUpload and done, no setup

Running olmOCR 2 7B locally

Local OCR reads printed pages, receipts and PDFs well, and the scan stays on your computer.

  • Private by designContracts, ID cards and medical letters stay on your disk.
  • Free and unlimitedTesseract, PaddleOCR and olmOCR cost nothing per page.
  • Works offline and in bulkA folder of scans can run overnight.

Where it falls short

  • Messy handwriting and complex tables are less reliable
  • A vision model takes more setup than a phone scan
See local tools for this task ↓

Cloud & apps

Cloud OCR and assistants handle messy handwriting, tables and odd layouts more reliably.

Our take

Go local for private or bulk documents; use the cloud for messy handwriting.

Choose local if…

  • Documents are confidential
  • You scan a lot

Choose cloud if…

  • Handwriting is hard to read
  • You need it once, right now

Will it run on my computer?

Pick the memory you have. A Mac counts 75% of unified memory. A graphics card counts 90% of its memory. A PC without a graphics card counts half of its RAM. The file we plan around is 5.5 GB.

olmOCR 2 7B fits. About 12 GB is free for this 5.5 GB file.

Official install guides

We link to the makers. We do not write our own install steps.