Capture / Import
Point your phone or webcam at the page and shoot — hands-free with voice control, no flatbed, no app-switching. Already have files? Import your PDFs and images straight in.
The powerful, fast & free book scanner
Give your books
the digital life
they deserve.
From your phone camera to a curated, searchable PDF At your desk, in the library, or wherever you are. No flatbed, no bulky rig: just you and your phone.
FREE No paywall
no in-app purchase
no subscription
Use a remote, your voice, or let Aglaïa do it for you
Drag slider to compare
Apple OCR or Mistral OCR (API key)
You can use your computer if you prefer
Linux NVIDIA users get a ready-to-run CUDA AppImage. On Windows, CUDA acceleration is available only via CLI install on WSL2.
The macOS · Windows · Linux desktop app is free & source-available. The iOS app is free too, but closed-source.
You don't have to settle
for crufty book photos.
You don't have to endure endless flatbed scanning sessions either.
Curved pages, skew, perspective, uneven illumination,
and dozens of issues that make you go « eewww… » when you look at your documents.
Aglaïa turns the camera and the laptop you already have into a proper scanner.
All automatic. Fully customizable.
3 scanning challenges,
1 standard pipeline to rule them all…
The following examples were all run with default settings. No fiddling needed.
A powerful pipeline architecture
Whether you're scanning books, spiral-bound reports, or loose sheets of paper, there's a specially curated pipeline for you.
Process
Isolate the text content, straighten it, and remove perspective and page-curvature distortion. Make your text pop with advanced binarization techniques.
Read
Fast and coarse or slow and precise; local (Apple Vision, Surya, PaddleOCR-VL) or cloud-based (Mistral OCR) — use the OCR that suits your project.
Export
A clean, searchable PDF for your digital archives or printouts? A well-structured Markdown file to feed your favorite LLM workflows? Aglaïa gives you what you need.
Scan anywhere with the continuity camera
Put your phone on your desk, your book on a chair, et voilà !
With a typical capacity of more than 1 page per second and a sub-2 seconds latency per scan, you may not turn the pages fast enough to overwhelm Aglaïa.
Take full advantage of your computing power
Aglaïa uses the latest GPU acceleration where it matters. Automatic batching delivers 2.5× speed on NVIDIA GPUs.
headless mode · 175 scans of a 2-pages/scan book
How much resolution do you want? — Yes!
Smart replay — no iterative distortion.
Deskew, keystone correction and dewarp each resample the image. Chain them naïvely and every pass softens and warps the pixels a little more — glyph edges crumble.
Aglaïa keeps track of the operations and at the end composes the perfect blend of geometric and morphological transforms to give you the sharpest result.
Watch a page take shape.
Every stage is persisted, inspectable and replayable.
scroll →
Simple, but not simplistic
Unleash the computer-vision and data-science nerd within you.
Full CLI automation
Run the end-to-end pipeline from the command line.
Versatile plugin system
The task at hand gets specific? Build your own processing elements in Python.
Freedom to choose
Have a favorite OCR provider? Need to export to cloud storage? Write your own adapters.
Install from the command line
GUI builds: macOS .dmg · Windows installer · Linux AppImage (above). For a CLI-only or scripted setup, use uv or pip on any platform.
# macOS, Apple Silicon
brew tap yb85/aglaia https://github.com/yb85/aglaia
brew trust yb85/aglaia # Homebrew 6.x: trust the third-party tap
brew install --cask aglaia # the GUI app (notarized DMG) — recommended
# or, run from a terminal instead of a .app double-click:
brew install aglaia-cli # same full app, launched via `aglaia …`
brew install aglaia-cli --without-gui # lighter: CLI-only, no Qt/GUI
aglaia ~/scans/my-book# build from source with the extras you want
git clone https://github.com/yb85/aglaia.git && cd aglaia
uv sync --extra gui --extra macos # macOS GUI: Vision, Speech, MLX dewarp
uv sync --extra gui # Windows / Linux GUI (Qt only)
uv sync # headless: CLI pipeline, no Qt
# add any of:
# --extra macos # Apple-Silicon local VLM OCR (GLM / Unlimited / Surya, MLX)
# --extra cuda # NVIDIA local VLM OCR (vLLM) + GPU dewarp
# --extra voice # offline voice control (Vosk, cross-platform)
# --extra cloud # Mistral cloud OCR
# --extra cuda # NVIDIA GPU dewarp (Linux)
# --extra server # HTTP job API (`aglaia server`)
uv run aglaia ~/scans/my-book # GUI; `aglaia run …` to batch headlessly# from PyPI — installs the `aglaia` command
pip install aglaia # lean base: headless pipeline, no Qt
pip install "aglaia[gui]" # Windows / Linux GUI (Qt)
pip install "aglaia[gui,macos]" # macOS GUI: Vision, Speech, MLX dewarp
# Local VLM OCR (GLM / Unlimited / Surya) rides the platform backend:
# pip install "aglaia[macos]" # Apple Silicon (MLX)
# pip install "aglaia[cuda]" # NVIDIA (vLLM)
# Apple Vision OCR needs no extra — it ships with [macos].
# pip install "aglaia[server]" # HTTP job API (`aglaia server`)
aglaia ~/scans/my-book # opens the GUI
aglaia run ~/scans/*.jpg # headless batchCompared to a commercial scanner with curve removal
| Commercial solution | Aglaïa | |
|---|---|---|
| Curve removal | ||
| Purpose | Facsimile | Pure text |
| Fully automatic | Depends on the model | |
| Hardware | Specialized rig | Mobile phone + laptop |
| Portability | ||
| Price | ≥ $330 | Free, voluntary donation |
| Speed | 40 pages/min | 100–200 pages/min (with GPU) |
| Extendable? | Closed source / proprietary | Desktop source-available* |
* The desktop app (macOS · Windows · Linux) is source-available: personal modifications and contributions welcome; competitive redistribution (SaaS, repackaging) prohibited.
Digitize your shelf.
Free — and the desktop app is source-available*, yours to extend.
Linux NVIDIA users get a ready-to-run CUDA AppImage. On Windows, CUDA acceleration is available only via CLI install on WSL2.