Importing images and PDFs

There are four ways to bring photos, scanned documents and PDFs into your notes.

Method	Where	Result	AI usage
Start from an image	Notes empty screen (also reached from Photo → note on Start)	A new note with the text recognized from the image	Yes
Extract text	An image block in a note	Text blocks added right below the image	Yes
Import PDF	The editor’s add-block menu	The pages you choose (up to 10 at a time) added as image blocks	No
PDF → note	Quick start on the Start screen	A new note with page 1 as text and the rest as images (up to 10 pages)	For page 1

Start a new note from an image

Create a new note from a single image that contains text, such as handwritten notes, a whiteboard photo or a book page.

Choose Notes in the navigation rail. With no note open, you see the empty screen Start a new note.
Choose Start from an image.
Pick an image file. PNG, JPEG, WebP and GIF are supported, up to 10MB per image.
The chip shows progress from Uploading the image through the recognition steps. When it’s done, a new note is created at the top level of the current workspace and opens.

The new note is laid out in this order:

Title: taken from the first heading or first line of the recognized text. If none is found, it’s 이미지 노트 (“image note”; this default title is always Korean).
Original image: the uploaded image, captioned 원본 이미지 (“original image”; the caption is Korean in both languages).
Recognized content: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, formulas and so on, as editable blocks. The language written in the image is preserved.

If the upload fails, you see Failed to upload the image. Please check its format and size. If conversion fails, you see a message such as Couldn't convert the image to a note. Please try again.

Extract text from an image

Recognize the text in an image that’s already in a note, convert it to Markdown, and insert it as new blocks right below the image. The original image block stays where it is.

Start text extraction

Use either of these on an image block:

Hover over the image and choose Extract text on the overlay.
Open the image block’s ••• options menu and choose Extract text.

While it runs, the button is disabled and shows a spinner and the Extracting text… label. When it finishes, the recognized headings, paragraphs, lists, tables and so on are added as matching blocks right below the image.

Messages you may see

Situation	Message
Default	`Extract text`
Running	`Extracting text...`
Unsupported external image	`External images don't support text extraction`
The image block was removed	`Couldn't find the image block to insert into`
No text recognized	`No text found to extract`
Extraction failed	`Couldn't extract text. Please try again later.`

If extraction fails because of a network or server problem, the detailed cause isn’t shown. Every extraction error shows the same message, so try again after a moment.

Import a PDF in the editor

Convert a PDF’s pages to PNG images, in order, and insert them into the open note. Each page is a regular image block, so after importing you can move or resize it and run Extract text only on the pages you need. Importing pages as images doesn’t use AI.

Choose the file and pages

In the editor’s add-block menu, choose Import PDF.
In the placeholder block that appears, click Choose PDF file.
Pick a PDF in the file picker. Only PDFs can be selected.
The button changes to Importing… while the PDF is read.
When the Import PDF dialog opens, check the file name and page count ({fileName} · {N} pages total).
Under Select pages, enter a Start page and an End page. You can enter 1 up to the total page count, and import up to 10 pages at a time.
Click Import. To go back, click Cancel.

The dialog shows Up to 10 pages can be imported at once. If the page range is invalid, you see one of these:

Enter page numbers between 1 and {N}
Start page can't be greater than end page
Up to 10 pages can be imported at once

If the PDF has more than 10 pages, import it in several ranges.

Progress and canceling

After you confirm, the dialog shows Importing {done}/{total} pages and a progress bar. Pages are converted and uploaded one after another, so they’re inserted in page order. When it finishes, the placeholder block disappears.

You can cancel while it’s running. Pages already inserted stay, and only the remaining pages are skipped.

If a page fails, the import stops with Failed to import page {N}. Pages already added are kept. Pages added before it aren’t removed. If the note changes during the import, for example the placeholder block is deleted, you see PDF import stopped.

File limits and errors

PDFs can be up to 100MB. If you pick a larger file, you see The PDF file is too large (max 100MB).
Corrupted or password-protected files may not open. In that case you see Could not read the PDF. The file may be corrupted or password-protected.

PDF → note on the Start screen

Create a new note from a PDF in one step, without choosing a page range.

Choose Start in the navigation rail.
In Quick start, choose PDF → note.
Pick a PDF file, up to 100MB.
The button shows progress such as Opening the PDF, Extracting text from page 1 and Creating the note.
When it’s done, a new note is created at the top level of the current workspace and opens.

The new note contains:

Page 1: its text is recognized automatically, giving a title, the page image captioned 원본 이미지, and the recognized content. This is the same layout as Start a new note from an image.
Page 2 onward: regular image blocks. To turn them into text, run Extract text on each image.
A closing paragraph, always in Korean: 나머지 페이지도 텍스트로 바꾸려면, 각 이미지 위에서 텍스트 추출을 눌러주세요. (“To turn the remaining pages into text, choose Extract text on each image.”)

Keep in mind:

Only the first 10 pages are imported. For a longer PDF, you see The PDF has {total} pages; only the first 10 were imported. If you need other pages, add them to the note with Import PDF and a page range.
Pages after page 1 that fail to import are skipped, and the note is created with the rest.
If it fails, you see Failed to convert the PDF to a note. Please try again.

For the rest of the Start screen, see Start screen.

Turn only the parts you need into text

Instead of converting a whole PDF to text at once, you can work page by page.

Use Import PDF to add the page range you want as image blocks.
Hover over a page image whose text you need.
Run Extract text.
Check and edit the text blocks added right below the image.

PDF page images are regular image blocks uploaded to MashNote storage, so you can run text extraction on each one separately.