Project Naptha text on image recognition technology comes to Firefox

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 26, 2014
Updated • Sep 27, 2014
Firefox, Firefox add-ons
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Project Naptha is without doubt one of the coolest extensions for the Google Chrome web browser. It enables you to select text on images to copy it to the clipboard.

That's great if you need access to that text, for instance to paste it in an email or a social media website, or to edit it in a text editor. While it is possible to copy the text manually, it may take quite some time depending on the length of the text.

The extension has been exclusively available for Google Chrome for some time. but has been available for Firefox for some time now as well.

You can download the most recent version of Project Naptha for Firefox from the official Mozilla Add-ons repository. While it promises the same functionality as the Chrome version, I had issues with it right from the start.

The main problem that I ran into was that it would not allow me to copy text from any image displayed in Firefox. I tried to do so in two different versions of the browser, one without any add-ons installed, and it still would not work.

project naptha firefox

I'm not entirely sure why it is not working but since there is no older version to try, I have to assume that the extension itself is not working properly at the time of writing (feel free to correct me if you find out that it works on your system).

According to the page on the Mozilla website, it should work automatically whenever images with text are recognized by it. When that is the case, it becomes possible to select that text to copy it to the clipboard or right-click to use other functionality such as translating the text into a different language.

I have contacted the author asking about the behavior and will update the article once I get a reply.

It is possible that this is still an issue on my end  and that it will work fine for others. If you give it a try let me know if it works for you.

The availability of the extension for Firefox is still great for the browser considering that the technology works fine on Chrome. If it gets fixed or resolved, it will surely become a popular extension for the web browser.

Update: It appears that the author of the extension has pulled it from the Add-ons repository. It is unclear if development will continue.

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Comments

  1. Zsolt said on November 25, 2014 at 8:34 pm
    Reply

    Unbelievable. No-one friggin saved the xpi? I’ve been searching for the past several minutes without success…

  2. anon said on September 30, 2014 at 7:37 am
    Reply

    This is another great app-agnostic image to text OCR Martin http://capture2text.sourceforge.net

  3. Dave said on September 29, 2014 at 7:42 pm
    Reply

    Aw, it’s gone. Who’s got the XPI? It might work with an old version of Firefox

  4. Doc said on September 27, 2014 at 6:12 am
    Reply

    “Image recognitation”??? LOL I think you meant “recognition,” Martin.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on September 27, 2014 at 8:52 am
      Reply

      Thanks ;)

      1. Wayfarer said on September 27, 2014 at 8:16 pm
        Reply

        I rather like recognitation. Just sounds classier. In my dictionary now. Must think of a sentence in a social gathering I can put it into.

  5. Rick said on September 26, 2014 at 5:51 pm
    Reply

    I guess it didn’t work for anyone :)

  6. ZzzZombi said on September 26, 2014 at 5:28 pm
    Reply

    Currently the addon seems to be removed by the author.

  7. fokka said on September 26, 2014 at 5:27 pm
    Reply

    i wanted to give the addon a try only to be greeted by this message on the addon-page:

    “This add-on has been removed by its author.”

  8. Rick said on September 26, 2014 at 4:54 pm
    Reply

    Not working here as well on my regular FF installation.

    I also tried installing FF32.0.3 on a virtual machine, and then just this extension. Didn’t work there either.

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