Upload a photo or screenshot and extract the text with free in-browser OCR. Progress bar, copy and download. No signup.
What is the OCR Image to Text?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads text inside images and turns it into editable, copyable characters. Point it at a photo of a document, a screenshot, or a picture of a sign, and it returns the words it finds as plain text you can copy, search, and edit.
This free tool runs the respected Tesseract OCR engine entirely in your browser — the library downloads once from a CDN on first use, then every image you process is analyzed locally on your device. Your photos are never uploaded to a server, which matters when you are scanning receipts, IDs, or private documents. A live progress bar shows the recognition percentage as it works.
Honest expectations: OCR is excellent on sharp screenshots and clean printed text, decent on good photos, and unreliable on handwriting, heavily stylized fonts, or blurry images. Always proofread the result — especially numbers and proper names — before relying on it. English text is supported; no signup, no watermarks, no limits.
How to use the OCR Image to Text
- Click Choose Image and select a photo or screenshot containing text (JPG, PNG, and most image formats work).
- Preview the image to confirm it is the right one, then click Extract Text.
- Wait while the OCR engine loads (first run only) and processes your image — a progress bar shows the percentage.
- Read the extracted text in the output box; fix any misread characters.
- Click Copy to copy the text, or download it as a .txt file.
OCR Image to Text use cases
Digitizing printed documents
Photograph a printed page, receipt, or whiteboard and convert it to editable text you can search, copy, and quote.
Copying text from screenshots
Extract text from screenshots, error dialogs, and app screens when copy-paste is disabled or unavailable.
Study notes from photos
Students photograph textbook pages or lecture slides and get text they can paste into notes and flashcards.
Grabbing details from photos
Pull serial numbers, addresses, or quotes out of photos without retyping them character by character.
Tips
- Sharp, well-lit images with high contrast extract far more accurately than blurry or dark photos.
- Straight-on screenshots of text give near-perfect results; angled photos of screens or pages do worse.
- Crop the image to just the text region before uploading — less background means fewer errors.
- Handwriting is not reliably recognized; this tool is built for printed and on-screen text.