Image to Text (OCR)
Pull the text out of a photo or screenshot — free, in your browser
11 languages built in. Recognition quality depends on the image’s resolution and clarity.
100% private — Files are converted right in your browser and never uploaded to any server.
How it works
- 1
Drop in a photo or screenshot with any text.
- 2
Choose the language (11 built in — English by default) and click Extract.
- 3
Read the result on the page, copy it, or download it as a .txt file.
OCR that never uploads your screenshots
Eleven OCR languages built in
English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian run on a Tesseract LSTM engine. The picker defaults to your own language, with Chinese and Japanese paired to English for mixed-script pages.
Small screenshots sharpened first
Images smaller than 1600 pixels on the long side are upscaled 2x and converted to grayscale before recognition — text at 9px, invisible to the raw engine, becomes roughly 95% readable after preprocessing.
Five image formats accepted
Drop in a PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP or GIF and get a plain-text .txt back. Empty whitespace lines from page margins are stripped so the result is just the extracted text.
Tesseract in WebAssembly, language packs included
- The full Tesseract engine runs in your browser via WASM — accuracy matches the native build for clean scans.
- Language data loads once per script (eng, chi_sim, jpn...) and caches for reuse.
- Sharp, evenly lit, print-quality inputs dramatically outperform angled photos.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded anywhere?⌄
No — the OCR engine runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your image never leaves your device.
Which languages are supported?⌄
All 11 site languages are supported: English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian. The ☁️ cloud Image OCR tool additionally accepts PDFs and batch uploads.
Why did it return no text or garbled text?⌄
OCR works best on clear, high-contrast, reasonably-sized text. Very small, blurry, rotated, or handwritten text is much less reliable.
Is there a file size limit?⌄
Up to 20 MB per image. Larger or more detailed images simply take a little longer to process.
Related tools
What Is an Image to Text (OCR) Tool?
An Image to Text tool, also known as an OCR (optical character recognition) tool, reads the words out of a photo, screenshot, or scan and returns them as editable plain text. Copying text from an image by hand is slow and error-prone — error messages in screenshots, printed receipts, scanned pages, and whiteboard photos all trap text in pixels. This tool runs a real OCR engine inside your browser page: drop in a PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP, or GIF, and the recognized text comes back as a .txt file. It is aimed at students, researchers, office workers, and developers who need text that is locked inside images.
Key features
- ✅ Accept PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP, and GIF images
- ✅ Run a browser-embedded OCR engine based on Tesseract
- ✅ Deliver the recognized text as a plain .txt file
- ✅ Work with no upload, no account, and no usage limits
- ✅ Show progress while the recognition runs
When you would use it
- 🖥️ Copying an error message or code snippet out of a screenshot
- 🧾 Digitizing a printed receipt, invoice, or business card
- 📄 Extracting text from a scanned page instead of retyping it
- 📋 Turning a photo of a whiteboard or a slide into editable notes
Privacy is built in: the OCR engine runs entirely in your browser, and the image never leaves your device. All 11 site languages are built in — English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian. For PDFs or batch jobs, the cloud Image OCR tool runs the same engine server-side. Accuracy depends on image quality and clean typefaces; handwriting and heavily stylized text are recognized poorly, as with any OCR system.