Bright Passages
Real Book Highlight Detection
Only for iPhone
$4.99 · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.
iPhone
Launch pricing: $4.99 — less than the price of a book. One-time purchase, no subscription. For readers who highlight everything and want it to mean something.
Kindle readers have built-in highlight sync. Physical book readers have a highlighter and a problem. Bright Passages solves it.
Point your camera at a highlighted passage in a real book. Bright Passages reads the page, transcribes the text, and detects what color highlighter you used — automatically categorizing the passage before you even tap save. Your highlights go from ink on paper to a searchable, shareable library in seconds.
Finally, an app built for people who read physical books.
Bright Passages is a digital commonplace book — the tradition of collecting passages from real pages that move, challenge, or clarify your thinking. Ebook readers have had this for years. Now physical book readers do too.
Highlight detection that thinks with you.
Bright Passages' camera detects six highlighter colors — orange, yellow, pink, blue, green, and purple — and maps them to your personal categories. Rename them anything you want. "Key idea." "Disagree." "Send to someone." "Come back to this." Answer one quick question when you first open the app — student, book club, fiction, nonfiction, or religious study — and your categories are already set up to match how you actually read. Change your mind anytime. The colors you already use in the margins; now they mean something in your library too.
Capture the highlighted words alone, or the full page with the marked passage emphasized — bold, italic, or both. Your annotation stays visible in the text, not lost in it.
One category system, two levels of control.
Set your categories globally across your whole library. Then override them book by book — so "Quote" in one book can mean "Premise" in a philosophy text and "Great line" in a novel, without changing anything else.
Add your own thinking.
After capturing a passage, Bright Passages prompts you to add a note — your reaction, a connection you made, a question it raised. Saved alongside the passage, included in every export.
Your physical library, finally organized.
Every passage lives inside its book. Filter by chapter, by category, by reading status. Search across every physical book you've ever read. Share a passage as a beautiful card. Export your whole library as CSV or Excel whenever you want — your data is always yours.
No subscription. No account. No cloud you don't control.
One purchase. Your data syncs through your own iCloud — private, automatic, no third-party servers. The words you've marked in real books deserve better than another monthly fee.
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FOR READERS WHO:
• Highlight passages in physical books and want them somewhere permanent
• Use multiple highlighter colors and want each color to mean something
• Keep a commonplace book — or always meant to start one
• Read as a student, in a book club, or for serious nonfiction, and want categories that already fit
• Finish a book and want to actually remember what mattered
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WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Photograph a page and get the text in seconds
• Capture just the highlight or the full page — with your marked passage bolded, italicized, or both
• Automatic highlighter color detection and categorization
• A one-time reader-type quiz that sets up your categories for you — student, book club, fiction, nonfiction, or religious study
• Add personal notes to any passage
• Rename categories globally or per book
• Filter passages by chapter, category, or search
• Share passages as designed image cards
• Export everything as CSV or Excel
• Reading status tracking (Reading, Want to Read, Finished)
• Bright Ideas — get a random past passage delivered on a schedule you set
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The best physical books leave marks. Bright Passages remembers which ones.
This update includes meaningful improvements to highlight detection accuracy — especially for highlighted words at the very start of a sentence or paragraph, which were sometimes missed before.
Also in this update:
Smoother handling when combining multiple photos into a single passage
Camera improvements, including fixes for macro focus behavior and occasional crashes
Crop tool now matches the standard Photos app experience
Streamlined Passage Capture settings
Various performance, memory, and stability improvements
The developer, Nathan Perry, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Usage Data
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Nathan Perry
- Size
- 5.3 MB
- Category
- Books
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 26.5 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 26.5 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 26.5 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 26.5 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Nathan C. Perry
