BMP to Text
Free BMP OCR. The megabytes are padding — accuracy says so.
VisionParse converts BMP bitmap images to editable text free in your browser, with no account required.
BMP is usually uncompressed, which makes files enormous without making them better: our 24-bit test page was 2,822 KB, its 8-bit palette version 103 KB, and an RLE-compressed version 103 KB — all three read at exactly 100% character accuracy. BMP is also the format most likely to hit an upload limit, purely from padding.
- Free · no account
- BMP
- 3 MB · 3 pages
- Deleted within 1h
Drop an image to read it
BMP — up to 3 MB. Your file is read on our servers in Frankfurt and deleted within the hour.
What this tool does, in numbers.
- ACCURACY
A 2,822 KB 24-bit BMP and its 103 KB 8-bit version read at identical 100% accuracy in our measurement — 27× the bytes bought nothing.
- LANGUAGES
VisionParse recognises 161 languages in BMP files, including RLE-compressed BMPs many tools fail on.
- SPEED
VisionParse read a BMP invoice in 0.57 seconds on an 8-vCPU server.
- LIMIT
A single 24-bit A4 BMP nearly fills the 3 MB free limit — convert to PNG first if you need to send more than one page.
- ACCESS
The BMP to text tool requires no account, no email address and no payment card.
- RETENTION
VisionParse deletes free-tool BMP files one hour after conversion.
Where the 100% at 27× size difference comes from.
Every figure on this page traces to a dated run on hardware we name. Nothing here is a vendor estimate.
Measured 2026-08-02
- Claim
- BMP file size is padding, not information: 2,822 KB and 103 KB versions of the same page both read at 100%.
- Method
- VisionParse standard recognition tier, single-threaded. Full methodology.
- Sample
- One synthetic invoice saved as 24-bit BMP (2,822 KB), 8-bit palette BMP (103.1 KB) and RLE-compressed BMP (103 KB), each read through the production pipeline and scored against ground truth.
- Measured
2026-08-02on Contabo Cloud VPS 8 — 8 vCPU AMD EPYC, 24 GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04.4- Limitations
- 8-bit palette conversion can hurt continuous-tone photographs even though it did not hurt printed text. A single synthetic document per variant is a small sample and is not a substitute for a corpus. These figures describe format behaviour, not general accuracy. A 500-document corpus run is scheduled and will supersede them.
- Contact
- VisionParse@senithu.lk
What this tool gets wrong
Compressed BMPs read correctly — including RLE. Run-length-encoded BMPs are rare enough that some OCR pipelines reject or misread them; we found and fixed exactly that class of failure in our own engine during testing, and RLE now reads at 100%.
BMP is the format most likely to hit the size limit. At 2.8 MB for a single 24-bit page, one screenshotted document can brush the 3 MB free cap. Converting to PNG loses nothing — PNG is lossless — and shrinks the same page by roughly 30×.
Arabic-Indic numerals come back wrong. VisionParse reads Arabic script cleanly on the free tier, but ١٢٣ returned as 1#|. Numeric Arabic documents should use the AI extraction tier instead.
Three steps, no account.
Drop your BMP
24-bit, 8-bit and RLE-compressed BMPs are all accepted.
We clean it up
Deskew, denoise and contrast normalisation run before recognition.
Take the text
Text appears with a confidence score. Copy it or download a .txt; the file is deleted within the hour.
What this tool accepts.
| Property | Free tool |
|---|---|
| Input formats | BMP — 24-bit, 8-bit palette, RLE-compressed |
| Output | Plain text, UTF-8 |
| Size finding | 2,822 KB and 103 KB versions: identical 100% accuracy |
| Maximum file size | 3 MB |
| Rate limit | 5 files per hour, per IP address |
| Languages | 161 |
| File retention | Deleted 1 hour after conversion |
| Processing location | Frankfurt, Germany |
When to use the API instead.
This page converts one file now. To convert files from your own software, the same engine runs over HTTP from Starter upward.
# same engine, from your code curl -X POST https://api.visionparse.app/v1/ocr \ -H "x-api-key: $VISIONPARSE_KEY" \ -F "file=@image.jpg" → 202 { "jobId": "c0df8e2c…" }
Use the API when
You convert more than a few files, convert on a schedule, or need results inside another system. Batch, webhooks and bounding boxes are API-only.
Frequently asked
Why is my BMP file so huge?
BMP normally stores every pixel uncompressed: our single A4 page was 2,822 KB where the identical PNG-class content fits in about 100 KB. The extra megabytes carry no extra information — both versions read at 100%.
Do compressed BMP files work?
Yes, including RLE-compressed BMPs — a variant some tools fail on. We measured RLE at 100%, and we specifically test it because our own engine once failed on it.
Should I convert BMP to PNG before OCR?
Accuracy-wise it makes no difference — both are lossless and both read at 100%. Practically, yes if size matters: PNG is roughly 30× smaller for the same page.
Is the BMP to text tool free?
Yes — 5 files a day with no account, no email and no card. A free account raises the allowance to 100 pages a month.
Do you keep my BMP?
Free-tool files are deleted one hour after conversion, and no customer file is ever used to train models.