# Bright Passages — Real Book Highlight Detection

> Digitizes and organizes physical book highlights and notes. (iPhone/iPad app by Nathan Perry.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bright-passages/id6792161370 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Nathan Perry](https://appshunter.io/developer/6792161372)
- Category: Books, Productivity
- Price: $4.99
- Rating: 5.00/5 from 1 App Store ratings · 1 written reviews indexed
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 26.5 · 5 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-07-30
- Data updated: 2026-10-08
- Monetization: paid
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bright-passages/id6792161370/reviews.md

## What is Bright Passages?

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 it, and detects what color highlighter you used — automatically categorizing the passage before you tap save. Didn't highlight it? Just select the text by hand instead — perfect for library books, textbooks, or any page you didn't mark up. Your highlights become 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.

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, renamed however you like. 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. The colors you already use in the margins now mean something in your library too.

Capture the highlighted words alone, or the full page with the marked passage bolded, italicized, or both. Need more than one page for a single passage? Take multiple photos and combine them into a single capture.

One category system, two levels of control.

Set your categories globally, then override them book by book — so "Quote" in one book can mean "Premise" in another, without changing anything else.

Add your own thinking.

After capturing a passage, add a note — your reaction, a connection you made, a question it raised. Edit any transcription with a built-in formatting toolbar for bold, italic, underline, and undo. Notes are saved alongside the passage and included in every export.

Your physical library, finally organized.

Every passage lives inside its book. Add a chapter number for citation-ready passages. Filter by chapter, category, or reading status. Search across every physical book you've ever read. Share a passage as a beautiful card. Export your library as CSV, Excel (formatting preserved), or Markdown. 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.

FOR READERS WHO:
Highlight passages in physical books and want them saved permanently
Read library books, textbooks, or any book they'd rather not mark up
Use multiple highlighter colors, each with its own meaning
Keep a commonplace book — or always meant to start one
Read as a student, in a book club, or for serious nonfiction
Finish a book and want to actually remember what mattered

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Photograph a highlighted page, or select text by hand if it isn't highlighted
Combine multiple photos into a single passage
Capture the highlight alone or the full page, emphasized
Automatic highlighter color detection and categorization
A one-time reader-type quiz sets up your categories for you
Add personal notes to any passage
Built-in formatting toolbar — bold, italic, underline, undo
Chapter numbers for citation-ready passages
Rename categories globally or per book
Filter passages by chapter, category, or search
Share passages as designed image cards
Export as CSV, Excel (formatting preserved), or Markdown
Reading status tracking (Reading, Want to Read, Finished)
Bright Ideas — a random past passage on a schedule you set

The best physical books leave marks. Bright Passages remembers which ones.

## Key features

- Camera-based highlight detection
- Automatic highlighter color categorization
- Manual text selection
- Searchable digital library
- Customizable categories
- Add personal notes
- Export to CSV, Excel, Markdown

## Is Bright Passages safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess Bright Passages.

## Is Bright Passages legit?

Bright Passages has limited verification signals. The AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Bright Passages is 58 out of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

## Recent user reviews (1 of 1)

All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bright-passages/id6792161370/reviews.md

### 5/5 — An app for lovers of physical books!

*2026-08-01*

This app is great—it’s clean, clear, does exactly what you want it to do. Easily allows me to organize highlighted passages. I’m using it for my book club but I can totally see how it might be helpful for a student or anyone who’s doing research.

## Frequently asked questions about Bright Passages

### What is Bright Passages?

Bright Passages is an app designed to help you digitize and organize highlights from physical books. It uses your phone's camera to scan highlighted passages and allows you to add notes and categorize them.

### How does Bright Passages detect highlighter colors?

Bright Passages can detect six highlighter colors: orange, yellow, pink, blue, green, and purple. These colors can be mapped to your personal categories for better organization.

### Can I use Bright Passages for books I don't want to mark up?

Yes, if you don't want to mark a book, you can select text by hand within the app. This is useful for library books or textbooks.

### What export options are available for my library?

You can export your organized library in several formats, including CSV, Excel (with formatting preserved), and Markdown. This ensures your data is accessible and usable elsewhere.

### Does Bright Passages require a subscription?

No, Bright Passages is a one-time purchase and does not require a subscription. Your data syncs privately through your own iCloud.

### What devices does Bright Passages support?

Based on the current data, Bright Passages supports iPhone. It is available for iOS devices.

### How often is Bright Passages updated?

The app was last updated on August 10, 2026, to version 1.1.1. This indicates a recent update, suggesting ongoing development and support.

### Is Bright Passages suitable for students?

Yes, Bright Passages is designed with students in mind. It can help organize notes and highlights from textbooks and study materials, making them easily searchable and exportable.

## Version history (last 4 releases)

### 1.1.1 — 2026-08-10

This update focuses on polish, accuracy, and a more organized Settings experience:

• Reorganized Settings — sorting and filtering now live right in your Library, and the rest of Settings is easier to navigate.
• Chapter numbers remember their titles — enter a chapter number you've used before in a book, and its name fills in automatically.
• New: a dedicated setting for combined transcriptions — choose "Only Highlighted Text" or "All Text" once, and every page in a multi-photo capture uses it automatically, no more prompts.
• Fixed: multi-photo captures no longer drop text or add stray paragraph breaks at the seam between pages.
• Fixed: library-imported photos now get the same color processing as camera captures, improving highlight-detection accuracy.
• Fixed: duplicate-passage warnings no longer misfire on genuinely new passages.

### 1.1 — 2026-08-08

What's New

This update brings several most-requested improvements:

• Capture passages without a highlighter — no colored highlight on the page? Just select the text you want directly on the photo, and it's added like any other passage.
• Take multiple photos in one capture — the in-app camera now supports multi-photo passages, just like importing from your photo library.
• New formatting toolbar — bold, italic, underline, and undo are now one tap away when editing a transcription, no more digging through the iOS text menu.
• Chapter numbers — add a chapter number alongside the title for cleaner, citation-ready passages.
• Smarter share cards — shareable quote images now resize to fit your quote, no more empty space.
• Markdown export — export your library to Markdown, in addition to Excel and CSV.
• New capture settings — choose what happens with unhighlighted photos: skip the category prompt entirely, or auto-assign a default category.
• Plus general accuracy improvements to highlight detection and several bug fixes.

### 1.0.1 — 2026-08-01

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

### 1.0 — 2026-07-30

No release notes.

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-10-08.*