Formats and modes
Supported file formats, size limits and color profiles
Everything PicTranslate accepts as input, what gets rejected and why, plus what comes back out.
Accepted formats
- JPG / JPEG — most common; lossy compression is fine for OCR up to typical web quality.
- PNG — best for screenshots and graphics with transparency.
- WebP — smaller files at similar quality, fully supported.
- BMP — accepted but rarely worth using; convert to PNG before upload.
Size and dimension limits
Web upload accepts files of any size — there's no per-image size cap. Very large source images do take longer to OCR, so for casual use a 1-3 MB export usually gives the best speed-to-quality trade-off.
Why GIF, HEIC and PDF aren't supported (yet)
- GIF — animated frames don't have a meaningful "translated single image" output. Convert to PNG/JPG first.
- HEIC — the iOS-default format isn't supported in-browser yet; export as JPG from your phone's photo settings.
- PDF — image-only PDFs (scanned documents) can be translated page-by-page after exporting each page as PNG.
Output format
Same format as the input by default (JPG in → JPG out, PNG → PNG). Quality is preserved at the original resolution. On Pro and Max plans you can override the output format per job.